This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

China is notorious for its heavy smog.

It's incredibly bad.

Denise Mauserall, an atmospheric scientist at Princeton.

The air pollution in eastern China can be so bad

that you can't clearly see across the street.

It can feel like you're walking through a heavy fog that's burning your lungs.

But Smog has other damaging effects too.

Mauserol and her team have found that in winter months, the Smog in China's

Northeastern provinces is so severe that it blocks more than 20% of sunlight from reaching the

region's solar panels. The findings based on satellite data and photovoltaic

performance models are in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One solution to the problem might be installing even more solar.

There's this virtuous cycle where if you use more solar electricity you can reduce your use of coal and that

will reduce the air pollution levels and that will then allow you to generate more solar

electricity.

China hopes to harvest 10% of its electricity from solar by 2030.

They'll need 400 gigawatts to get there,

or about 10 times what we have installed in the US today. It's an optimistic forecast for

solar and hopefully for China's air quality too. Thanks for listening. For

Scientific American 60 Second Science, I'm Christopher in Deliata.