Massive Solar Plant In the Sahara Could Help Keep the EU Powered (digitaltrends.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: In the global race to ditch fossil fuel reliance for more renewable energy sources, Europe is already making some impressive strides. That is likely to ramp up considerably thanks to a new European Union plan to build a large solar plant in the Sahara desert -- with the ability to generate enough power to keep much of Europe juiced up. In all, the enormous solar farm aims to produce 4.5 gigawatts of power, which can then be transmitted across the Mediterranean from Tunisia to mainland Europe. TuNur's proposed solar farm utilizes an enormous quantity of mirrors to reflect sunlight onto a central collector, which uses molten salt to store the energy as heat. Three HVDC submarine cables will then transport the power to Europe. The first cable will link Tunisia and Malta, the second will link Tunisia to central Italy, and a third will link Tunisia to the south of France. "We are opening a new energy corridor to allow Europe to import cheap solar power from the Sahara on a massive scale," Daniel Rich, Chief Operating Officer of TuNur, the company behind the project, told Digital Trends. "This will help Europe meet its Paris Climate Agreement emissions reduction commitments quickly and cost effectively. It also will give a much-needed boost to the Tunisia economy through significant investment into the country, creation of thousands of jobs, new tax revenues, and the establishment of a new solar industry that can help support their future domestic demand."

Comments

Re:Terrorism

[Rei]

taken down with one well placed bomb.

So terrorists now have submarines? You do realize that the lines are underwater, don't you? Only the stations are aboveground. And there's three of them. Very large structures containing row after row of AC-DC converters, not just "one bomb and it's all gone". And even if that wasn't the case, losing one station would just mean a rebalancing of the European grid - flows changing direction, peaking coming online followed by reserve, etc. The significance of even losing all three (you're talking warfare, not terrorism - but what military would want to destroy a valuable export asset?) would depend heavily on when it happened.

And lets place that in one of the most war torn regions in the world.

Tunisia hasn't been in a war since World War II. There have only been two military skirmishes since then - one in 1961 with France over a naval base that France never gave up when Tunisia became independent, and the other a single bombing by the Israeli air force against a PLO headquarters. Internally, there have been brief periods of unrest - the most recent being the revolts that led to the resignation of Ben Ali (and the start of the Arab Spring) in 2010 - but they have never been associated with widespread bloodshed or destruction. The Tunisian Revolution in 2010, for example, only involved 338 deaths.

Re:Slowdown global warming?

[EndlessNameless]

And this will help deter global warming how?

The alternative is to release heat stored in the chemical bonds of fossils and release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere which trap more heat.

Either way, you are releasing/retaining 4.5 GW of energy. The difference with solar is that you avoid a greenhouse effect which traps even more heat.

Remember that this sunlight has already reached the Earth's surface and is therefore part of our normal energy input from the Sun. The 4.5 GW absorbed by the solar array will radiate out eventually, just as it would naturally. The only difference is that it will do some useful work first---and it will radiate out from Europe instead of Africa.