The so-called “Godzilla” El Niño weather event of 2026 is expected to impart changes to global solar irradiance patterns that will significantly increase deviations from average regional cloud coverage. The effects of these periodic climate phenomena, spawned by higher surface water temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean, are enough to significantly alter the expected output and thus economic performance of solar power facilities worldwide.
Experts expect regional irradiance gains in India, eastern Australia, and parts of Africa and Central America. Parts of South America and East Asia are forecast to have reduced irradiance levels.
El Niño events have greater or lesser intensity in each occurrence, which, although nominally periodic, come with intervals of between two and seven years. The 2026 event is shaping up to be more intense than usual, hence the Godzilla monicker. If this all sounds highly variable and difficult to register for accounting purposes, that’s because it is.
At the same time, considerations of the impact of El Niño solar irradiance patterns on PV plants have lagged somewhat behind other more publicly visible effects, such as linkages to the North Atlantic hurricane season, winter flooding and even wildfires. Marcel Suri, CEO of Slovakia-based solar weather and climate data analysis company Solargis, told pv magazine USA that a combination of the increasing severity of El Niño events and changes in the economics of utility-scale solar projects have made it more important for stakeholders to factor them in.
“El Niño is well known publicly because its magnitude has global impacts on weather, creating extreme effects such as heat waves in Europe and the U.S., and may have also have created drought conditions contributing to the fires in northern Canada and elsewhere,” Suri said.
Reporting in pv magazine USA, Australia-based solar analytics firm Solcast says the 2026 event is expected to intensify and peak in the second half of the year. In past years with strong events, as this one is shaping up to be, changes in irradiance levels were about 10% off the average. The Rajasthan state of India, a major solar development region and home to some of the world’s largest solar plants, can expect 15% higher irradiance levels, Solcast said. Meanwhile Chile and eastern China can expect reduced solar production.
If dramatic weather is generally newsworthy, incorporating El Niño into solar project planning, financing and operations is a development less than a decade old. According to Suri, this is due to improving state-of-the-art modeling algorithms and the need for more exacting understanding of the economics of irradiance.
The latter is true, he asserts, because the steady fade of government-sourced incentives is making solar developers and owner-operators much more cognizant of the environmental factors affecting the bottom line. He says the industry needs to absorb more high-resolution data and more granular, more physically based approaches to the design of grids, new powerplants and markets to sustain them. What sorts of algorithms do smart trackers need because of extreme weather events? When is it desirable to use bifacial technology? How much battery storage is needed and when is it best to charge or discharge it?
“As little as five years ago, nobody was considering any of that; you just build a project, you calculate the power generation modified by some incentive and that was it,” Suri said. “Today, nobody is going to guarantee that your project will be able to sell during summer noontime because the grid will be congested. The industry is transforming from using simpler tools, simple approaches to something that is more complex and requires much more granular data, looking deeper into history so that you can understand the trends.”
The importance of El Niño is not because its effects have been unknown or unobserved; it has been a named phenomenon since the 16th century, although the linkages to Pacific water temperatures date only to the mid-20th. Rather, as the economic margins of solar plant financing and operations narrow, understanding the patterns of its effects become critical.
“Historically, the PV industry was using relatively simple data like average values, and this was good enough in times where we did not suffer so much from climate change,” Suri said. “Also, financial models were very simple: You would get paid more or less for anything that you delivered to the grid. Many developers and operators of solar power plants now face difficulties because they may not have included such extreme events in their technical calculations and in their financial models.”
Fortunately, companies like Solargis are developing tools that not only analyze meteorological input from satellites and other sources but that refine solar radiation models optimized for calculation of financial parameters of new projects, routine performance monitoring or forecasting to be able to generate and sell electricity more effectively. If a Godzilla El Niño is arising out of the Pacific, it pays to know about its footprint in your region ahead of time.
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