The impact of photovoltaic power plants on surface energy budget based on an ecohydrological model

Solar photovoltaic (PV) generation has become the major type of solar energy utilization as the world's energy demand grows. However, the layout of large-scale public PV plants changes the original underlying conditions and has an impact on the local surface energy budget and distribution. Based on the ecohydrological model T&C, taking the fixed utility-scale PV plants as the typical object proposes a PV module, and the T&C-PV model is developed to simulate the impact of PV plants on the regional surface energy budget. Compared with the original T&C model, a substantially improvement of the simulation of energy flux in the PV plant paved underlying surface has been achieved in the T&C-PV model. This model is applied to PV power plants in Xinjiang Province, China, and the results show that the sensible heat flux increased by 12% and the latent heat flux decreased by 25%, with the percentage of transpiration decreasing from 90.1% to 74.5% and the percentage of evaporation increasing from 9.9% to 25.5% after the PV power plants are set up.