Original title: Impact of extremely high temperature on future photovoltaic power potential over East Asia
Changyong Park, Ana Juzbasic, Dong-Hyun Cha, Seung-Ki Min +4 · September 2026
Solar panels, also known as photovoltaics, generate clean electricity from sunlight to replace fossil fuels. However, intense heat harms their performance. Sunny days with extremely high temperatures often produce a lot of solar energy, but rising global temperatures threaten this supply. Researchers examined how future extreme heat events will change solar power potential across East Asia, an area vulnerable to climate extremes. They evaluated multiple future periods and emission scenarios. The team found that extreme heat will cause solar power potential across East Asia to drop in every scenario and time period. The losses grow larger toward the end of the 21st century and hit hardest under high-carbon emissions. Hotspots like northern China and southern Mongolia could face drops of up to -7.2 %. Hot air temperature is the primary driver cutting panel productivity, showing that extreme warming will actively reduce future solar generation.
Your phone battery drains faster on a hot summer afternoon, when you need it most for maps and rides. The hotter the day gets, the less charge you get out of a full battery, so every heat wave becomes a battery crisis. In this paper, solar panels are the phone, and the hot afternoons are the extremely high temperature days that will come more often as the climate warms. With higher emissions, those days hit harder, so East Asia's solar farms produce less power from the same sunlight, especially in northern China and southern Mongolia.
East Asia is adopting solar power to replace fossil fuels and cut CO2 emissions, but its heat waves are intensifying. On the hottest days, when solar potential is high, future PV output is projected to drop—by up to 7.2% in some key solar zones. Grid planners who count on those sunny days will need a new forecast.
The abstract doesn't say what the limitations of the analysis are. It does note that under summer-mean conditions the sign of PVpot projections varies across sub-regions, while on extremely high temperature days the decrease is consistent in all regions. No grid-level or economic consequences are reported.
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Impact of extremely high temperature on future photovoltaic power potential over East Asia — Changyong Park, Ana Juzbasic, Dong-Hyun Cha et al.
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.