Slashdot Mirror
Should We Fill the Sahara With Solar Panels? (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A panel of experts at the BBC discuss the possibility of re-purposing the Sahara Desert. Instead of having over 9 million square kilometers of barren sand, we could start a massive project to gradually fill it with solar panels. The remarks are illuminating: "The technology is good. It's matured a lot in the last few years in terms of thermal storage. And the Sahara desert is so big that if there is cloudy weather, it's localized, and with thermal storage, it can provide absolutely reliable power." The difficulties turn out to be mostly political: "The biggest potential pitfall is that it's politically complicated. You're not going to develop solar energy in the Sahara unless you have a very strong state involvement, both on the side of the consumers and the project developers." And one of the panelists points out that Africa must have a large share of the benefits: "Things have changed. Africans are self-confident now, they want to participate in their development, and they want to have part of their resources, they are not just there to always give to the rest of the world and remain poor."
Solar panels don't like sand storms.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I've been told how simple, easy, and cheap "in situ resource utilization" will be on Mars, so clearly it should be super simple to do it right here?
I guess we're just lacking the political will to do it, though.
The plan has always been there to wallpaper Saskatchewan with solar panels. Well, the plan in my lab book and written up on several white boards...
Islamic Solar In Sahara
One of the benefits of switching to renewables is to move the energy source away from muslim controlled countries. This clearly does not have that advantage.
The Sahara has some benefits (right weather, low cost land), but probably has more costs than make it worthwhile. As the article says, there are significant political issues. They will require huge bribes, either directly to the politicians involved or to organizations that 'represent the people' (that don't really). When someone says that Africa must have a large share of the benefits, you know that means that lots of people need to be paid off.
Sadly, it makes more sense to do it someplace with a better political system, better technical infrastructure, and closer to where the power will be used. The overall cost will turn out to be lower.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
"The technology is good. It's matured a lot in the last few years in terms of thermal storage........... The difficulties turn out to be mostly political:
So, thermal storage is the only technical problem, and is now considered "matured". What are people smoking?
The only fair way is a fight. Like in sports - the winner should be decided by a fight (outside martial arts usually called a match). If two teams decide to negotiate we call it corruption (like under the table deals in FIFA). So why the hell don't we allow the better ones to win in international politics?
Let's invade Sahara. The political situation will be clear, it will belong to the winners.
Those guys are career progressives. They take your money and give you empty words in exchange.
Let's fill the Sahara with large "panels" of them to do the repair and maintenance, so that real workers don't need to dehydrate themselves to death while on crack.
It will improve but if you were to put a billion dollars into solar panels, you would see a fifth the amount of solar actually built there which changes the cost/benefit equation substantially.
Plus it becomes a massive target for attacks and blackmail over attacks. You could patrol and militarize the region but that would cost money and change the cost/benefit again.
And... some of the dunes in the sahara are 75 stories tall and they drift around and could cover your facility if left unchecked.
And finally, creating that much shade under the panels would probably change the microclimate. You might see changes under the panels- life taking a foothold in the shade. Not sure what unintended consequenes that might have.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You're not going to develop solar energy in the Sahara unless you have a very strong state involvement
And that's why it won't work. Top-down revolutions have a difficult time taking hold. What works is empowering the individual to increase their livelihood in a way that provides a mutually beneficial relationship with the rest of society. Imposing economic change via dictate or "imminent domain" results in discord, perhaps more so in a place like saharan Africa.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Great Idea..what could possibly go wrong?
Oh, wait....
has anyone modelled what impact this would have on the weather systems we currently enjoy(sic) here in Europe?
One big disadvantage of solar power is that it only works some of the time. The intermittent nature of both solar and wind is a serious problem. There's some amount that they help each other out, because in many locations the wind is strongest at night. Because of the intermittent nature of solar power, one cannot have large scale grids be completely solar without a lot of improvements in storage technology. Right now, battery technology is improving but it isn't where it needs to be. The best storage for most purposes right now is pumped hydroelectric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity where one pumps water high up to a reserve when there is excess and then recovers it using a hydroelectric plant. This is more efficient than batteries. However, it requires specific geology to work well.
The other big issue with this plan is an issue is efficient transmission. If you are putting a large fraction of the entire world's power in one area, you are going to need to have massive transmission lines. Transmission is a major loss of power already. There have been small scale projects to use superconductors for transmission lines which need to be kept very cold but have very high efficiency. Holbrook Substation in Long Island for example has a 600 meter long superconducting line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Project but this is literally multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the distances needed for the proposal,some of which would likely need to go underwater, and there has never been a serious superconducting line run underwater.
http://www.desertec.org/
I do not see the word “albedo” in this article. This is worrying. A lot of ecologist militant consider solar and wind energy as free energy just there for the taking. This is mostly true, but not entirely true.
Covering a large area of land with solar panels (even assuming they are thermal panels, not too fragile and with not too much fabrication byproducts) would change the albedo of that area, i.e. the proportion of solar light that is reflected by the ground. This will in turn change the climate of the area, and if the area is large enough, change the climate of the whole planet by changing the trade winds. It is entirely possible that in this particular instance the change would be for the good, but it is very hard to predict.
The same applies to large farms of wind turbines: they capture energy from the wind, and therefore weaken prevailing winds. Any large-scale localized change to elements of the climate has very complex consequences.
To get any good out of that much electrical power, you'd need a huge market to sell it to.
Europe wouldn't be it - too far away, across the Mediterranean. The rest of Africa? Maybe once the political landscape settles down. No bets on that one, though.
Sell electricity to the locals? The poor ones? In a region where oil prices are naturally low?
Build a whole bunch of new industries to use it? You're in a chicken-and-the-egg situation there. Nobody would build the factories until the power was ready, and nobody is going to build the solar system until they know they can sell the power. Then, of course, you need to ship raw materials in, and train a whole generation of factory workers from scratch, in a relatively short period.
And, as others have mentioned, solar plants in deserts have the "sand question" to deal with. Beside the whole issue of sandblasted glass, you have to keep them clean, which means, in general, water. Which is in incredibly short supply in the Sahara.
Of course, the authors admit these issues, but handwave it with "state involvement," which means "we need to get governments to pay for this silly thing."
The useful thing about oil is you can extract it and move it to your point of industrial/domestic use. Unless you start out sourcing to Algeria etc how do you distribute the power efficiently? I do like the idea of setting up a solar panel manufacturing plant in a desert using solar panels for power.
Meanwhile, I have a bridge for sale in the Sahara, too.
Yes and no.
Somebody got to watch them water wells! And if they will steal your water you better bet they will steal or degrade and destroy your panels. Silly humans.
Not unless you're also going to build the unprecedentedly massive infrastructure needed to distribute that power across the world, and pay for the huge army that will be needed to protect it from sabotage, invasion, or attack.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Sand dunes may be a huge issue in the Sahara. The darned dunes move around quite a bit and can bury a village rather quickly. Perhaps some solar panels could be dedicated to desalinization so that the deserts could be made to support vegetation sufficient to hold the sands in place.
This is an easy one for me anyway we need our power to come from a domestic source period. How much have we enriched those asshats in the mid east for our energy needs? Do we really want to foot the bill for setting this up only to once again pay other countries for our energy needs? The best part about renewable is that it cuts our dependence on foreign energy.
Who is "We" ?
The discussion in that article is about a technology that concentrates the solar energy to melt "salt" .this molten "salt" is then used to boil water to drive steam turbines. I know a bit out this. While in theory the water is condensed and resumed, it is the sent to cooling towers. The result of this is the need for a lot of really clean makeup water.
I suspect the lack of water resources in a desert actually makes this recnically I feasible.
No, mainly for geopolitical reasons. We spent about a century and a half turning the middle east into a warzone so that major Western powers could have a secure supply of fossil fuels. Let's not turn Africa into the same thing but for the solar age. I can guarantee if the world's electricity generation occurs primarily in one place, then there will be economic and geopolitical value in fighting over control of that place, unless it's already a heavily secured first-world nation to begin with.
Fortunately, the laws of physics and other Slashdot commenters inform me that this kind of plan is infeasible as electricity transmission simply does not go that far. I guess that's one advantage of the solar age, it flat-out does not support petrostate geopolitics.
At least not yet.
The cost of transmission would be significant. The cost of construction would be non-trivial (get the panels form a nearby port to the site, get enough labor locally, supply chain all of their needs, etc). The reliability risk of putting so many eggs in one basket (both at the site and the transmission across the Mediterranean). And, concentrating the solar in one place results in unnecessarily diurnal production.
Instead, put some panels in the Sahara, sure. But before that, keep putting panels in low-cost locations nearer to load. Rooftops. Sites containing waste (capped landfills, etc) or otherwise economically non-productive and ecologically not interesting. Roadsides. The installation cost per kW will be higher, because of a lack of economies of scale, higher labor cost, and additional equipment necessary. But, you get the value of saving on transmission and distribution construction costs and line losses, the smoothing and stretching of production due to geographic diversity, and both the energy security and the economic boost of doing work in your own country,
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Why do we finally create a technology that is capable of drawing energy from the sun while being small enough to localise at the energy user and then insist on on building it in the middle of nowhere?
I hate the idea of solar power plants. I love the idea of a panel on every roof.
So you are going to generate all of this electricity in the middle of Africa and who exactly is this going to benefit? Is it going to benefit Africans? Is there even that much demand for power in most of Africa? Or is this just another way to export resources to Europe, probably over HVDC cables....
Here is a hint, you British twats, figure out how to keep Africa from being a complete war ridden, starving shithole.
Before we get too excited there are some pretty substantial environmental and political and technical issues to consider.
1) What is the effect of large scale solar panel deployment on local atmosphere and climate conditions as well as ecosystems? That is a LOT of sunlight being reflected no matter what technology you use. I could see a "sea" of solar panels creating it's own climate and not necessarily a beneficial one.
2) The governments in that part of the world aren't noted for their stability or integrity. While this is nothing new to energy companies it would be a big issue.
3) Countries blessed with copious natural resources often find it to be a curse. I see no reason why sunlight should be different from oil in this respect.
4) Maintenance could be a pretty substantial problem on such a scale.
5) The sun isn't shining for a pretty substantial part of the day even in the Sahara (it's called night) and energy storage is still a big problem.
Imagine we completely fill the Sahara with solar panels. Would they be reflecting enough beams to let us send focused beams of light into space? Could we use such a cluster to send Morse code messages into space to other civilisations or use it as a weapon in case of alien invasion?
Provided that an intelligent civilisation receives our Morse message, how long would it take them to decode it and actually figure out what do we actually mean by our words?
This line just shows what idiots they are. Africa is not poor because the rest of the world takes from them or because they give to the rest of the world. They are poor due to culture. If you want to be rich you need capitalism. People need to be able to own land and capital equipment and not have to constantly worry about losing it in wars, theft, or graft. Change the culture and you will be rich very quickly.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
No we should not.
The political problems not-withstanding, the problem with power generation is not where it's most efficient, it's in transferring the power to where it's intended use is. People don't live in the Sahara, so you need massive transmission lines which bring a host of problems with them.
I'm surprised people are even discussing this possibility. People in favor of solar power always seem to forget the issue with transmission and that's almost always the killer of any solar project.
To get any good out of that much electrical power, you'd need a huge market to sell it to.
Europe wouldn't be it - too far away, across the Mediterranean. The rest of Africa? Maybe once the political landscape settles down. No bets on that one, though.
All of non-Scandinavian Europe is within 1500 miles of the Sahara. About 200 million Africans live farther away from the Sahara than that.
And 1500 miles isn't that far. For one thing, we've got plenty of under sea cables spanning distances on the order of the width of the Mediteranean, be it the ~10 miles near Gibraltar or the ~100 miles from Tunisia to Sicily, or even the ~350 miles from Egypt to Turkey. For example, NorNed is a 360 mile undersea cable between Norway and the Netherlands. Of course, there will need to be some firming of transmission infrastructure in Europe if you're dropping that much power at one (or even multiple) locations, but the problem isn't one of distance.
The problems are cost, energy security, and reliability. There are still plenty of low-enough cost locations throughout Europe for Europeans to spend that much money in Northern Africa and be encumbered with the reduction in energy security and reliability. As for Africans south of the Sahara, it's really the same story. The additional production per watt of panel in the Sahara isn't enough to overcome the transmission requirements -- cost, security, and and reliability.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Avoid politics and choose the oceans.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Just make sure the Tuareg can get their camels through the solar farms, and provide them with unlimited WiFi internet and cell phone access! That IS their land, after all!
I have always been curious about a solar project that large over desert and what negative impact, if any, it might directly have on the environment vs. the positive environmental impact of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. After all, we are talking about imposing a radical change on an environment that has been relative static for a few millennial. While sand of course reflects sunlight, solar panel reflect it right back up much more so. The consequence? I am not aware that anyone has a clue. Then there is the morning dew. Yes, even the Sahara has it. An unknown amount of that will condense on the bottom of the solar panels and fall back down. I can only suspect that would be very gradual, but given time... In fact, perhaps in a couple of decades we will have created conditions that will allow us to remove some of the panels and engineer the ground into farm-able land. I have similar questions about large scale wind power.
I am admittedly not making a point, just tossing out some conjecture for discussion as I have had these questions for a very long time.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The BBC in favor of a German pipe dream? It's going to be an interesting 2016...
We are currently living at the mercy of arab nations and their ideology of hate. Changing to solar power in the sahara would _once again_ place us at the mercy of that same ideology. Let's build thorium plants instead, and finally develop fusion to production level.
We spend what, a billion per year on fusion now? And 50 billion or something on agriculture (including such "vital" substances as wine, tobacco, etc.)? Let's turn that around for a few years, see how quickly fusion will become a reality...
Also, I'm not sure that "repurposing" is a word you should be using for what is, in the end, a unique ecosystem... We have already "repurposed" enough of the planet.
For the amount of power the world uses, the effect a negligible. http://www.digitaltrends.com/c...
http://www.desertec.org/ They tried to launch an initiative to build solar power in north Africa. However, they did not succeed so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://theconversation.com/jap...
If you're going to build a massive solar installation, it makes sense to start with somewhere like nevada or arizona - politically stable, infrastructure already in place and plenty of nearby demand.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Rail guns make your suggestion impractical. Nuclear plants can't be defended from intercontinental rail guns. Must use dispersed power source in future if the kinds of conflicts that worry you persist.
I get tired of the "we should......".
Panels are so cheap now if you want solar power get off your ass and install it on your own home. Why fill up the desert with collectors when your roof is doing nothing?
If you beat the green drum and haven't done that yet you are a hypocrite and need to shut your hole.
You'd only need a small area of land to provide energy for the entire world. Distribution would be the main initial problem, the issue of storms can be handled by using multiple sites using storm protection measures.
One big disadvantage of solar power is that it only works some of the time. The intermittent nature of both solar and wind is a serious problem.
Hypothetically speaking, suppose one could build an automated factory that makes solar panels.
It doesn't even need to be completely automated, it could have a few humans running around repairing machines and doing administrative tasks, but let's suppose that the human intervention is minimal(*).
Such a factory could conceivably run on solar power, which means that over time the factory would make enough panels to generate twice the amount of power it needs to make solar panels.
So we could then build a 2nd panel factory.
And in another same amount of time the 2 factories would make enough panels to generate twice the power again, so we could build two more factories, making four in total.
This process is exponential, with a specific doubling life. When you have enough power, you can start repurposing the newly-created power to other factories to make stuff needed by the rest of the world. Fixing Nitrogen into fertilizer, polymerizing CO2 and water into long-chain hydrocarbons, turning imported Bauxite into refined Aluminum, as well as exporting solar panels. (Water is available near the ocean shores, and underground in the desert.)
Extrapolating this trend, it's possible to have a largely automated system that generates all the solar panels, fertilizer, and Aluminum needed by the rest of the world, in a self-sustaining way, and for the indefinite future.
The major obstacle to this is the petty politics of a so-called "intelligent" species.
(*) Using silicon from sand as a feedstock, and importing other trace materials such as Indium for ITO coatings.
Change the question from We to I. Does the potential for return outweigh the risk on an individual level? If not, it likely doesn't on a societal level either.
I've been told how simple, easy, and cheap "in situ resource utilization" will be on Mars, so clearly it should be super simple to do it right here?
I guess we're just lacking the political will to do it, though.
Typical ISRU proposals for Mars are designed for an operating lifetime of 2.2 years, which is the amount of time between Mars launch windows.
I'll also point out that, "The Martian" notwithstanding, there aren't destructive sand storms on Mars.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Solar panels don't like sand storms.
Sandblasting mirrors is bad too.
Actually, sand blasting is much worse for mirrors than for flat-plate photovoltaic panels. Sandblasting the surface of a photovoltaic panel had very little effect-- it roughens the surface, but roughened glass still lets light through. Roughened mirrors, however, while they still reflect light, reflect it diffusely, which is useless for concentrating sunlight.
Dust is a more of a problem, because it sticks, but there again, it's worse for concentrating systems than for flat plate panels, since much of the scattering by dust particles is forward scattering.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
We have plenty of roofs in our major cities that we can put solar panels on - This just seems to be a much better idea to me.
Also, has anyone even considered the possible environmental effects of covering the Sahara with solar panels??
I guess proponents of this don't know how tough blowing sand is on transparent materials. No matter, the anti-carbon industrial complex is predicated on planned obsolescence. Lots of people will be making lots of money on replacement parts for decades. Said rich people will then be lobbying heavily against better technology e.g. fusion.
It's coarse and irritating and it gets everywhere.
folks who just want to watch the world burn don't get very far. They can't because they destroy everything they trough. Folks like Boko Haram are just using age old techniques of fear and Balkanizing their population to gain power. This is why racism and classism are so important. As a ruler you need to divide the working class into groups that fight among themselves so you can seize control. The patterns repeat again and again in every major civilization.
When you say crap like "Some people want to watch the world burn" you just encourage us to ignore root causes and the means a ruling class takes and maintains control of their population.You're not helping...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
People talk about deserts like they are a barren wasteland. Deserts are ecosystems that sustain life as much as a forest or grassland etc. You greenies talk science, but don't know science. Tell me why the glaciers that covered large swaths of th US melted without human transgressions and I will believe your BS. Until then, don't put solar panels all over the desert.
This whole idea is a distraction from credible solutions. First, not a lot of load in the area. Transmission doesn't seem credible with current technology. They talk about power being transmitted 1000 miles from northern Quebec to Boston, but this is part of a huge grid with multiple local and less distant generators. Plus, 1000 miles from the Sahara gets you where? Nowhere there is significant load. You could use the power to make hydrogen or sequester carbon.
This is probably a small problem compared to what to do with the small but significant percentage of the people in the area that are completely at odds with any modern lifestyle and use guns and bombs to keep it that way.
Let's not and say we did.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
If the question is "should Western governments spend massive amounts of money to put solar panels in the Sahara desert", the answer is "no".
When it becomes economically feasible to do so (taking into account political risks and transportation costs), investors will start doing so.
The only reason for Western governments to do this is because Western militaries could (and would) implicitly subsidize the necessary security arrangements. "Subsidize" here means that once our government had built massive solar farms there and we were energy depend on it, our military would do and spend whatever it takes to defend them.
The usual economic illiteracy from Slashdot... *sigh*, I will explain, yet again: the economic returns aren't there for solar panels.
btw, you have plenty of deserts in your own countries... oh I forgot, you pretend to care about the desert tortoise and such.
"Things have changed. Africans are self-confident now, they want to participate in their development, and they want to have part of their resources, they are not just there to always give to the rest of the world and remain poor."
They get BILLIONS IN AID!!
Africa is a net taker, it hasn't given for more than a century,
More PC bullshit.
If they want to take a large share of the benefits, they can pay for and build their own solar panels.
We can put ours out in the ocean where they don't get covered in sand.
Very good, put solar panels(check Morocco attempt) everywhere. Then what? You need infrastructure, wires to carry the electricity & how are you going to store it? I a continent that has not much, you CANNOT bottle the damn thing & they have NO electrical grid to distribute it. As usual an idea & good intent does not make it feasible in the real world... Let's not talk also of "how much is it going to cost", "how many people are we going to need to bribe" & "how are we going to protect all that from the nihilists of looney islam?"
Basically, the distances involved make this a foolish idea.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
While this would undoubtedly supply sufficient clean energy to meet all of Africa's needs for the present, it would irreparably destroy the habitat of the Chadian sand louse, a small but essential component of the ecosphere in central Africa. The entire food chain would collapse. I am shocked that the BBC would even suggest such a brutal and destructive strategy. We need to mobilize the Sierra Club and other caring organizations to take to the streets and prevent this from happening.
This announcement was sponsored by the Oil Research Institute, ExxonMobil, and the Saudi and Qatar governments. Thank you.
Would be improved political stability of those regions. Whilst it's no excuse, there is a connection between poverty and extreme behaviour. Give those countries a regular income that they earn. The system could create a lot of jobs.
That's a funny way of saying that they have weapons and are willing to go to war to prevent the West from stealing more of their stuff.
will be politically possible. It the local population get some benefits from the solar power plant then they will protect it. Another possibility is wind power. The power can be sold to West and East Africa and to Europe.
This stellar pannel of experts must be lunatic.
Hint: AFRICA is not a country. Maybe it was 150 years ago when you owned half of it, but not any more.
Let's see... if the entire desert were covered with solar panels and those panels absorb all the radiation that otherwise would have reached the desert itself, what environmental or climatic consequences might there be? We found out the hard way that wind turbines have unexpected consequences; have we still learned nothing about taking off the selfish blinders and seeing the whole picture?
Coren22 you started things with apk above this post yesterday and you lost a debate with him long ago on his ware http://slashdot.org/comments.p... and then you were begging he do what he's done now to you in that same exchange you trolled him in. You're the fool. Don't you think we can read and decide for ourselves?
You have a point Coren22. You crushed yourself for trolling and lying about apk's host program. Quotes of you don't lie.
I see a lot of people here proposing problems, and solutions.
All of them are technical, which is appropriate, as most readers here are geeks ( like me)
The real problem is some stupid bastards who will have to blow it up ( for the glory of Allah) or some other stupid bastards trying to hold it hostage.
Some serious money has to be set aside, in advance, for rewards for stopping saboteurs.
And probably one can justify the expense to the local mucky-mucks with job creation.
The only problem this project can really have is with the people trying to stop it for their own personal greed and creed.
I am sure we will hear about how it kills birds, or is a sin, etc.
The only worse place to attempt a project like this would be in the Southern USA.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
How about using the solar-generated energy to power the transformation of the desert? Large desalination plants could be built to use the energy to create fresh water which could be pumped into the interior of the desert to irrigate new forests. New forests would be likely to have a beneficial effect on the climate in the long run: trees generate oxygen and sequester carbon
Where are they going to use the power anyway? Probably cheaper, safer, and uses less space just to plop a couple of nuclear plants in a spot where terrorists won't try to blow them up. Plus, Africa would have no power at nighttime. Kind of an issue with solar.
Last time I checked, the Sahara Desert wasn't in the isle of Great Britain. Nor is it in Northern Ireland.
I don't know where the Beeb gets this "we" crap.
LOL, it would be like placing a big umbrella over all that sand, which wouldn't heat up, and would be cool all the time, which would kill all the life that lives in the dessert. Oh the humanity!
Sand will destroy the panels in a short amount of time. The way to terraform would be to bring more water into the area, and change it from a desert. But many people would be against changing ecosystems, and it would be tough.
Haven't seen this anywhere.
Okay, most of the people think that a desert is lifeless.
It isn't. There's an entire ecology there.
Sure, most people will think it worthless. That still doesn't change the fact that things LIVE there.
Glassing it over with panels will destroy that ecology.
And, unlike hydro, where fish populations can be kept alive artificially until dams can be torn down, once you destroy the desert, even ripping all the panels down will not restore what's been destroyed.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
But even discounting the sand storms angle, you've got a hundred little, impoverished, unstable countries in the area.
If you think the scrappers in your suburban neighborhood are aggressive... just wait until the starving ones from the Sudan show up.
If you want to do good in the part of the world, put your money into deposing despots, ending corruption, defeating terrorists, and building solid educational systems in this area.
With all the inhumanity we see in africa, don't you think it's the slightest bit condescending to address this issue... before the litany of others?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
The Sahara is a rather large heat-sink, absorbing the sun's energy by day and releasing it by night. This helps drive weather systems to its east. Covering it with solar panels would change that dynamic, as the sands of the Sahara would no longer be able to soak up the heat -- now blocked by solar panels. .. not to mention the ecology of the Sahara; after all there IS life there, and this would affect them as well.
In small regions, this isn't enough of an issue to become an actual problem. But the Sahara is a big enough region for that to happen.
The Sahara isn't just empty, wasted space.
A solar installation like that would be very large and impossible to protect from the locals. And honestly why would we have any interest in the project? The Europeans can source power from the east if they really need it. Though nuclear power does seem the most reasonable power source for them regardless. But if they must get power, get it from the east. And the US has no need for such a thing.
The only people that might want/need such a thing are the north africans... and they're basically descending into general civil war at this point so I don't see why this would be seen as a good idea.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Conversion of solar energy into consumable electricity should not be thought of in terms of modern transmissions grids we use in Europe/N. America. Those grids work because energy generation required large facilities to produce prodigious amounts of electricity. Solar makes more sense when you look at it from a distributed energy generation system. Generation distribution minimizes transmission loss by reducing length of transmission lines and captures more solar energy as an aggregate. If we want to be serious about the developing world and our climate future, we as the western world need to invest in that type of technology to allow a technological leap frog.
How about instead of covering MORE ground space that doesn't need covering and destroying more ecosystems, you use the goddamn rooftops that are all over the fucking world?
Eastern US forests have about 50 to 100 tons of life per acre. The Sahara, small regions around oases excepted, would be lucky to break a ton per acre. The intense sun and lack of water are deadly; shielding a lot of the land from the sun is likely to promote life.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
You do realize just how large the Sahara is and what a small percentage of it would have to be covered to meet all of Europe's needs?
All of the places where we live were once wild and things LIVED here too.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
When you can precisely demonstrate _that_, then you can clearly quantify the impact of such a project. Until then, you are guessing at the repercussions ... and that is just a bit sociopathic, no? This really looks like an exercise in profiting on the gullibility of people ... "We'll build a monorail!'
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
No, put an inland ocean in the middle of it. Doesn't matter that it is salt water because the evaporated water won't be and the water that seeps into the ground will be mostly filtered of salt. The area will become something better than a desert. We need more vegetation in the world, not less.
Also, it would be pretty cool to make a sand to glass 3d printer. Imaging printing some glass green houses, or just plain houses for that matter.
Well, has anyone run a simulation to see what effect that altering the albedo of that much land would have? Perhaps putting dark blue arrays on dark blue ocean water is a better idea? Plus you get the bonus of free cooling water that would have absorbed the heat anyway. "Non-vegetated regions like the Sahara Desert reflect about 30 to 40% of the Sun’s incoming light. " http://www.eoearth.org/view/ar...