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The World's Largest Solar Farm Rises in the Remote Egyptian Desert (latimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1913 on the outskirts of Cairo, an inventor from Philadelphia named Frank Shuman built the world's first solar thermal power station, using the abundant Egyptian sunshine to pump 6,000 gallons of water a minute from the Nile to irrigate a nearby cotton field. World War I and the discovery of cheap oil derailed Shuman's dream of replicating his "sun power plant" on a grand scale and eventually producing enough energy to challenge the world's dependence on coal.
More than a century later, that vision has been resurrected. The world's largest solar park, the $2.8-billion Benban complex, is set to open next year 400 miles south of Cairo in Egypt's Western Desert. It will single-handedly put Egypt on the clean energy map. That is no small feat for a country that's been hobbled by its longtime addiction to cheap, state-subsidized fossil fuels and currently gets more than 90% of its electricity from oil and natural gas. [...] The Benban complex, which will be operated by major energy companies from around the world, is expected to generate as much as 1.8 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. It will consist of 30 separate solar plants, the first of which began running in December, and employ 4,000 workers.
More than a century later, that vision has been resurrected. The world's largest solar park, the $2.8-billion Benban complex, is set to open next year 400 miles south of Cairo in Egypt's Western Desert. It will single-handedly put Egypt on the clean energy map. That is no small feat for a country that's been hobbled by its longtime addiction to cheap, state-subsidized fossil fuels and currently gets more than 90% of its electricity from oil and natural gas. [...] The Benban complex, which will be operated by major energy companies from around the world, is expected to generate as much as 1.8 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. It will consist of 30 separate solar plants, the first of which began running in December, and employ 4,000 workers.
Fossil fool plants also cause bird deaths. Y'know, science...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
That's fewer than 1% of the birds killed by hunters in Texas every single day. And just about the same as the number of birds killed by airplanes every month in North America.
Don't be a dope. And please, don't pretend you give one blessed fuck about birds getting killed when all you want is to spread FUD about solar energy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Egypt also has a ton of wind turbines along the coast of the Red Sea, which I was surprised to learn. These are positive steps.
That said, Egypt is also in the process of opening not one, but three gas power plants totaling 14.4GW of new capacity, dwarfing their solar initiative.
I have friends who sell and install private solar in Egypt, but with grid power directly owned and subsidized by the state, it's hard to compete. Which is a shame, because Egypt's air pollution and AQI is right up there with India and China, and has only gotten worse over the past decade. Unfortunately the government seems about as keen to actually address air pollution as it does to support human rights, which is to say, not very much at all.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
No extraction costs? What do you call the $2.8 billion to build the thing?
I'm not a geologist or anything, but I call that a construction cost. Which applies to any power generation station.
Really, this isn't hard. Most of the same costs like construction and transmission will apply to any power generation station. But with things like solar, wind, and hydro, you only need to build them in the right location, you do not need to pay to get the fuel.
Extraction costs is getting the coal out of the ground, processing costs is getting the raw coal into a usable state, shipping costs is loading it onto a barge and shipping it down to Florida, energy production costs is building a coal fired power-plant in Florida and buying coal at market prices so you can burn it and generate energy for Floridians to use to air condition their houses. Contrast this with solar, where the is no digging up the sunlight, no processing the sunlight into a usable state, no shipping the sunlight down the Mississippi on barges to Florida, you get to go straight to the power plant building part and there your costs are basically fixed since there are no fluctuations in the price of sunlight the price of sunlight is pretty much always $0.00. The real beauty of this idea is to use the sunlight you are trying to escape to cool down your house.