The Realities of Sahara Solar Power
June 22nd, 2010
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A post recently ran in Slashdot regarding plans to import solar energy to Europe from northern Africa. It referenced this Reuters article about the plans to build a massively expensive trans-Mediterranean electrical cable, which is planned to begin transmission of power in five years as the first step in the project. Needless to say, the “nerds” at Slashdot are all over this like it as realistic.
The European Union is backing projects to turn the plentiful sunlight in the Sahara desert into electricity for power-hungry Europe, a scheme it hopes will help meet its target of deriving 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources in 2020.
“I think some models starting in the next 5 years will bring some hundreds of megawatts to the European market,” Oettinger told Reuters after a meeting with energy ministers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
He said those initial volumes would come from small pilot projects, but the amount of electricity would go up into the thousands of megawatts as projects including the 400 billion euro ($495 billion) Desertec solar scheme come on stream.
“Desertec as a whole is a vision for the next 20 to 40 years with investment of hundreds of billions of euros,” said Oettinger. “To integrate a bigger percentage of renewables, solar and wind, needs time.”
The EU is backing the construction of new electricity cables, known as inter-connectors, under the Mediterranean Sea to carry this renewable energy from North Africa to Europe.
Some environmental groups have warned these cables could be used instead to import non-renewable electricity from coal- and gas-fired power stations in north Africa.
“This is a good question but not a question to destroy our project,” Oettinger said. “This question must be answered by a good answer and so we need ways to ensure that our import of electricity is from renewables.”
He said he believed it was technologically possible to monitor electricity imports to the EU and establish if they come from renewable sources or fossil fuels. “This question must be solved in the next years,” he said.
SOLAR SUBISIDIES
The Desertec consortium includes major firms such as Siemens, RWE and Deutsche Bank. They are expected to seek public money for the project.
Yes, you did read right about the money that the EU plans to invest in this. That is billion, with a B. Hundreds of billions of Euro. The money is all going to come from governmental subsidies (assuming they don’t go bankrupt first). While it’s common practice to tout the private investment in these projects as being a sign of the business potential of solar power, the fact is that this is not being done because these energy sources have any realistic potential in the market. The investors will recoup all they put into this and then some at the expense of European tax and rate payers.
The sheer scale of this project and its expense should in and of itself raise skepticism, especially when it i focused on a power source that has a history of cost overruns and disappointing returns. While solar thermal power does have the advantage over photovoltaic of providing energy storage that can last through the night, it’s a mechanically complex system that has been called a “plumbers nightmare” of thin tunes baking in the sun while molten salt or other fluid runs through them and all too often leaks or forms a clog. Alternatively, a solar thermal power facility may be composed of parabolic reflectors, each equipped with a small sterling engine and generator, complete with barrings and gaskets that need to be lubricated and cleaned of sand and cylinders that will need to be checked for gas leaks.
Hence, these facilities are extremely maintenance intensive.
The enthusiasm for these pie-in-the-sky proposals is generally absent of discussion of the practical issues involved. For example, how exactly do they plan to cool these solar power plants in the desert effectively? Unless they’re all built on the coast, this issue alone is a potential deal beaker.
There’s no mention of what they expect searing sandstorms to do to millions of acres of polished mirror troughs or panels. In fact, blowing sand and sandstorms (which are not uncommon in the Sahara) can produce two distinct problems. Particles of blowing sand have a tendency to produce a static electrical charge which causes them to stick to objects, making the removal of the coating surprisingly difficult. Washing down a sand-covered object with water would do the trick, but this is one of the most arid regions of the world, so that’s not generally an option. Secondly, severe sand storms can easily scour and etch polished or smooth materials, covering the surface of transparent or mirrored surfaces with microscopic abrasions and resulting in a hazy, frosted appearance. For solar collectors, this would be catastrophic.
However, I would like to focus on one very important and deceptive statement often made about these schemes:
“If just 1% of the Sahara Desert were covered in concentrating solar panels it would create enough energy to power the entire world.”
Strictly speaking, this may be true. The Sahara is about the best place on planet earth for solar energy (aside from the sand and lack of heat sinks.) It receives very little precipitation, has as close to zero atmospheric humidity as about anyplace on earth and is at a latitude that assures fairly direct solar exposure.
However, it’s also enormous. At 9,400,000 square kilometres (3,630,000 sq mi), the Saharah is larger than the entire continent of Europe. It’s larger than the United States, larger than Australia and larger than all but two countries in the world: Canada and Russia, although Canada only barely squeezes by as larger than the massive African desert. It is arguably the largest single contiguous geographic region on the face of the earth.
With such a huge area, even one percent is gargantuan, 94,000 kilometers to be exact. This is larger than many European countries. The US state of New Jersey is home to nine million people and is less than 1/4 this size. It’s larger than all of Tasmania, significantly larger than Scotland. It’s roughly equivalent to the entire state of Indiana.
Hopefully this gives some impression of size. A person could easily spend their life walking around the state of Indiana and still not see every square inch of it. To drive down every road in New Jersey three times over would take years.
Paving this entire area with cement or asphalt would be a daunting task, but that’s not what is being proposed here. No, rather, it is being proposed that it be paved wall to wall with high quality, highly polished mirrors, and that these mirrors, tens of thousands of square kilometers of them, not simply lay flat, but that each and every one of these billions of mirrors be on a precision electronic actuator to track the sun.
If such a project were undertaken, even if it were intended only to provide a significant amount of the electricity needed by Europe, it would be more likely to be composed of numerous smaller areas than one single monolithic collection area. Thereby necessitating the creation of not only gargantuan collection areas, but thousands upon thousands of miles of service roads, electrical transmission lines, coolant water pipelines and huge networks of support buildings, pump stations, transformers, work camps and control points.
And… that would power the world. However, even if it could be done, it’s another matter whether the enormous economic and social consequences that would come from undertaking a task to dwarf all other civil engineering projects by orders of magnitude would be anywhere near worth the return.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 11:45 am and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, Obfuscation, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 22nd, 2010 at 12:54 pm
IMO this is just yet another smoke-screen to pretend that something is being done. They will have this is the ‘planning stage’ for years, then the ‘demonstration projects’ and so on. Nobody except the green suckers in Europe believe something like this will ever be built. Even if it was, it leaves Europe at the mercy of largely Muslim states for their energy needs.
But a few careers will be made pushing this fantasy while coal and oil and gas continue to provide the backbone for energy in most of those countries.
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June 22nd, 2010 at 1:55 pm
Regarding “The Realities of Sahara Solar Power” (2010-06-22), there really is no no need for concentrating solar power in Europe because there is a simple mature technology that can deliver huge amounts of clean energy without any of the headaches of concentrating solar power.
I refer to ‘Nuclear Power’ (NP), the technique of amplifying a neutron flux through the fission of heavy metals to create heat, and then using the heat to raise steam and drive turbines and generators, just like a conventional power station. It is possible to run NP plants on demand so that electricity generation may continue through the night or on cloudy days, or when the Russians decide to cut off the gas. This technology has been generating electricity successfully in California since 1957 and six million Californians currently get their electricity from this source. NP plants are now being planned or built in many parts of the world.
NP works best near cool shores and, of course, these are not always nearby! But it is feasible and economic to decrease outlet temperatures using highly-efficient ‘natural draft’ cooling towers. With plant efficiency losses at about 3% per cooling tower, NP plants may be placed anywhere in the US. NP plants at existing coal plant sites could easily meet the entire current US demand for electricity.
In the recent ‘EIA Electric Power Annual’ report commissioned by the US government, it is estimated that NP electricity, which does not need to be imported from exotic locales, is already one of the cheapest sources of electricity in the United States, including the cost of cooling. A large-scale cooling tower manufacturing infrastructure has also been proposed by Alstom as a means of optimising the use of NP throughout the world.
Further information about NP may be found at http://www.niof.org and http://www.atomicinsights.com . Copies of the EIA Electric Power Annual report may be downloaded from http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html . The many problems associated with concentrating solar power are summarised at freedomforfission.blogspot.com/2007/01/commenter-referred-me-to-anti-nuclear.html .
For those of you who aren’t blog administrators, this is a parody.
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June 22nd, 2010 at 2:46 pm
An interesting point – nuclear power is really like any thermal power plant in that the ideal situation is to have a nice cold water source like an open shore to use for cooling. This can be done with or without cooling towers to supplement the cooling.
However, if water is scarce then it can be done with cooling towers alone. A few percent of efficiency is lost (depending on the operating temperature, it can be less significant if you’re dealing with a higher temperature plant driving a gas turbine) and that’s, of course, not really ideal, but if it comes down to it and building transmission lines and line losses is just too much, then it can certainly be accommodated with only draft cooling towrs.
If it is absolutely necessary to use no water at all, not even to create the cooling tower draft by spraying it, there is the possibility of a “dry cooling tower” and forced-draft cooling. This would be akin to how your car is cooled. It’s a big radiator that just uses radiation and convection to cool and if there is not enough air circulation a big fan blows it across.
Certainly less than ideal, but if you absolutely had to use no water, then it’s possible. Again, best suited for high temperature reactors where there’d be a bigger difference from air temperature.
I don’t know that this is realistic for solar thermal though. In the first place there you’re talking about such piddle-power, that it’s not like you can spare an ounce of efficiency.
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June 22nd, 2010 at 3:21 pm
The Sahara Desert is a great place to generate solar power. Unfortunately, it is an abysmal place for actually *using* that power. This is also the problem with geothermal power — the best places for generating it don’t tend to be places where it’s convenient to use it, and getting the power to someplace useful results in so much power loss that the whole thing is, at best, only barely breaking even.
Now, I have heard of some ideas for solving that problem. The main problem is transmission lines, and I’m sorry, Europe, but a trans-Mediterranean power cable is idiotic on several levels. If nothing else, it’s a single point of failure for the whole “African solar power to be used in Europe”* concept. So the solution has to eliminate those transmission lines. One idea that sounds really good to me is setting up some sort of “renewable energy” generator in one of those places where there’s a fantastic natural energy source which normally can’t be exploited because it is inconveniently remote, and then using the electricity to drive electrochemical reactions — in particular, splitting water to produce hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be transported by tanker and used to power fuel cells with far less energy loss. Of course, it depends on a large fuel cell market, and that market won’t take off until there’s a reliable supply — classic chicken and egg situation.
* “African solar power to be used in Europe” is frankly a bit condescending. Why aren’t they interested in African solar power to be used in *Africa*? Is the quest to be “green” so important that they have to rape another continent — again — to achieve a semblance of it? Why can’t they back the construction of factories in north Africa as well as the solar power plants, to use the power before too much of it has been lost? Seems like that would be a win-win, if anybody could see that far, or was really all that interested in anything more than appearing to be tough on global warming.
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June 22nd, 2010 at 4:52 pm
What pisses me off the most is that solar boosters still have the gall to suggest that solar is decentralized with no single point of failure unlike those “big and inefficient nuclear plants”.
Weather systems are a significant fraction of the size of a continent; that’s an obvious common failure mode, so how do they actually suggest the intermittency that results from this be dealt with?
They suggest aggregating over larger areas; build continent wide “webs” of HVDC transmission with the necessary control mechanisms to shuffle massive amounts of power from anywhere to anywhere. The “dumb” grid we have now works great for “big and inefficient nuclear plants” and other generators despised by the greens; only wind, solar and wave-power need this massive expansion of the grid.
They suggest demand-shifting with things like water heaters, freezers with embedded phase-change material, air conditioning, electric cars etc. to come with ’smart electronics’ that attempt to ‘overconsume’ in glut so they can ‘underconsume’ electricity in a shortage. This is a continent wide Rube Goldberg machine.
They suggest idiotic schemes like putting expensive photovoltaics, that may be very attractive to steal, over a huge area of desert in some of the poorer areas of the world and attaching it with a small number of powerlines to central Europe, an obvious point of common-mode failure.
It is true however that the photovoltaics are spatially distributed across a large area; this however is not a benefit, it is a drawback.
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June 22nd, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Calli Arcale said:
Stranded energy sources is a vast area of research, and has been for years. There are no shortage of ideas on how these sources might be used, however the economics have never really worked out. Moving energy from one place to another seems to be inherently difficult, it ether requires specialized fixed networks, or loosy conversion steps.
At any rate several countries in the Middle East are looking to buid nuclear plants, and their solar insolation numbers are at least as good as North Africa. That to me says volumes on the practicability and viability of large solar projects.
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June 22nd, 2010 at 7:44 pm
DV82XL said:
Calli Arcale said:
It would be, but it won’t be because this is all so unrealistic that it’s never going to happen. Generating that much power by constructing such ridiculously large plants made up of glass mirrors in a sand-scoured desert, away from any infrastructure is just not going to happen. It’s just not. It’s so ridiculous, it is not even worth taking the notion seriously.
It seems to me like it’s a kind of disservice to even talk about problems like the single failure points of distribution or of the issue of foreign control of energy, because these are not problems with this idea, since it would never get that far.
Saying “there’s the problem of how to deal with the potential of a foreign government stopping the power” is giving this credibility. it’s like saying “But how will we feed all the unicorns?”
If people actually thought this was the issue in the way (which it isn’t because it’s not possible to deal with bigger issues that undermine it all.)
You’ll just end up with people then saying they have an answer. “Oh, we can just build lots of power links in different places so if any one or a couple fail it won’t be a huge deal.” “We’ll build the solar power stations in different countries with different links to Europe, so even if Morroco tries to cut us off, we’ll still have plenty of power from Liberia and Egypt” “Oh, we’ll keep fossil fuel stations in Europe and that way if the link is severed, we can use them as backup until we repair it and it won’t be a big problem because we’ll only use them once in a great while for emergencies”
You give credibility to these problems and you give credibility to the whole concept. You start complaining about the problem with feeding all the unicorns and people are going to take that as some kind of admission that unicorns exist. Then someone is going to come up with what they think is a reasonable plan to feed all the unicorns. It doesn’t matter! There are no bloody unicorns. we don’t need to worry about how to feed all the unicorns!
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June 22nd, 2010 at 7:50 pm
Engineering Edgar said:
I admit you have a valid point there.
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June 22nd, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Take a look at some of the proposals out there and some of the actual examples of solar thermal power stations. Look especially at the “number of jobs” which is generally written in a manner as if to make it seem to be a wonderful thing that these “create many jobs.” Notice that even for modestly sized solar-thermal plants have a huge number of full time employees. This does not even count the number for construction or the number of others who might work for contractors or indirectly on things like transmission lines.
They’re not inflating the numbers to make it seem like it is a job-creating project. A 40 megawatt solar thermal plant will really employ over one hundred full time laborers.
They are truly a nightmare to keep running smoothly and I don’t think many seem to appreciate that. The DOE conducted a number of trails of these in the 1970’s and then again more recently. The parabolic trough design seemed to produce the most favorable energy returns, but I don’t think there was ever a time when one of those was running and didn’t have at least one leak somewhere in it and often multiple ones that needed workers constantly running around and plugging them. If it wasn’t leaking, valves get stuck, pipes get clogged or partially blocked.
These plants spread a huge amount of electro-mechanical devices over a large area and operate them under extremely harsh conditions. That seems to be something that is just impossible to overcome.
One other thing about the leaks and clogs is that if they’re not terribly severe, they just leave them during the day and cut off flow to that portion if they can. At least that way working in the brutal desert sun can be avoided. This is done the way most outdoor maintenance is done after dark, by using big portable flood lights mounted on trucks or trailers. Yes, I know, there’s a lot of irony to that. Of course, it does not matter so much if the project is intended primarily for research and not to produce power, but I have to wonder whether that would be the same method applied to the ones built with the intention of power generating.
The power tower concept might reduce the distribution of leaks a bit, but it introduces its own problems.
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June 22nd, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Calli Arcale said:
I’m not entirely sure of that. I mean, it’s not like the technology does not already exist to produce hydrogen from solar thermal plants and it’s not like there is not already a huge market for hydrogen. Even without fuel cell cars, there’s actually a very large demand for hydrogen from the fertilizer, oil refining, chemical production, plastics and other industries.
Nearly all the hydrogen used industrially comes from steam reforming natural gas. If you go and buy a tank of hydrogen at your local welding supply store, chances are that is where it came from – not water.
I don’t see any big fertilizer plants replacing their natural gas systems with solar thermal production. I don’t see any major compressed gas distributors looking at it. The reason would seem to be that it can’t compete with the traditional methods.
The one use of solar energy in arid regions that I do see as having some pretty big potential is desalination. There have been quite a few proposals that seem to have some pretty significant potential, but it doesn’t seem to garner much attention.
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June 23rd, 2010 at 1:42 am
drbuzz0 said:
Agreed there, also in the Middle East (the part of the world with the greatest need for desalination) solar power has an advantage over nuclear reactors in that it is less likely to attract the attentions of the Israeli Air Force…
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June 23rd, 2010 at 4:15 am
The Desertec idea is not at all new, it was first mentioned in the seventies of the last century. I saw the drawings myself in the Munich office of Ludwig Boelkow, the founder of the German Aircarft ans Space Industry. At that time they were even smarter: Instead of making electricty, following the rules of thermodynamic, they intended to m ake hydrogen in North Africa and use this hydrogen as a real renewable energy carrier. The new Desertec plans are talking about High Tension Voltage (if it shuold be AC or DC would not make much of a difference) for transportation to Europe. This technology, which is nearly 200 years old, does not help. What we need now is a disruptive, decentralized energy supply in production, distribution and usage. As long as we stick to the monopolistic structures ot the utilities (and/or oil companies), we have lost already. More about this in the new book: The Hydrogen Society…more than a Vision?, available at amazon.com and other international amozon outlets
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June 23rd, 2010 at 8:02 am
Arno A. Evers said:
Yup, you lost me at hydrogen. Was really interesting comment until you went all bat **** crazy on us with:
Arno A. Evers said:
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June 23rd, 2010 at 10:32 am
Arno A. Evers said:
And this is a smart idea why? Hydrogen production is at least as lossy as a thermal engine based generator and usually much more so. Using electrolysis is terribly ineffecient and although thermochemical processes are better, they’re still not going to give you any better energy output than a good turbine generator. That’s just the producing the hydrogen, of course. The total cycle efficiency of the process of producing hydrogen and then burning it or running it through a fuel cell is abysmally low.
That’s not even considering the other energy needed for such a ridiculous scheme. Hydrogen needs to be compressed or liquefied, which requires energy. It needs to be transported, again requiring energy. The energy density is fairly poor, so you’d be talking about many enormous pipelines or huge tankers.
Then there’s boiloff loss. And, of course, there’s the whole issue of having to now build a whole system of fuel cell plants to convert it back to electricity.
It’s… just a horrible idea on so many levels.
Arno A. Evers said:
It’s the generating that is the problem, not the transport, actually. There’s no reason why electricity can’t be transmitted hundreds of miles with very minimal losses. There are several submarine cables in operation in the world that are more than 150 miles long. Transmitting power across the meditation by submarine cable is entirely reasonable with current technology.
The reason electricity is the standard for long range transmission of energy is that it is so efficient. Energy can be transmitted continuously while only losing a few percent.
DC is preferred for undersea electricity transmission. It does complicate things because of the need for static inversion plants, but with submarine cables, reluctance becomes a major issue to contend with so DC turns out to be the way to go.
Arno A. Evers said:
Well, first of all, it’s not nearly that old. The modern version of power grid system is more like 100 years old, and solid state inverters and many other technologies in modern grids are much much newer.
Not that it matters at all. The wheel is at least tens of thousands of years old. It’s still pretty useful. Knives and cutting blades are even older technology, but still pretty damn important.
Arno A. Evers said:
Because??
You know we used to build things in a “distributed” manner and not in big centralized factories. Back when cars were built that way, they were a rich man’s toy. We also used to grow food in a “distributed” way in little patches and subsistence farms. People routinely starved to death.
If the structure of the utilities bothers you so much, then go off grid and either live your life by candle light or buy yourself a generator.
Arno A. Evers said:
At least they ended the title with a question mark. I can answer it for you. No. it’s not more than a vision.
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June 23rd, 2010 at 12:21 pm
All this technological talk is quite interesting, but there is one sticky point that I haven’t yet heard : what about the roving bands of mercenaries that are not totally uncommon on the African continent ?
The social and political situation over most of the African continent is not exactly stable nor perfect. Corruption abounds, criminal gangs deal openly in many places, and automatic firearms are common enough for the term “warlord” to have a commonly accepted meaning.
What exactly are those “warlords” going to do when they hear of a high-tech, expensive installation available for raiding in or not too far from their operational territory ? Well they’re going to take a look, of course. And they’re going to raid whatever they can and resell it on the black market to fund their operation, be it revolution or just massacre.
That will happen, and when it does there will be the traditional outcry. Depending on the political importance of the installations, help will come under the form of troops, be it from NATO, the UN, or just a coalition of Euro forces.
Hey, it’s not like we’ll trust local government to secure our multi-billion euro installation, now is it ? Of course not.
So, in addition to the issues with sand, abrasiveness, static cling and other, purely mechanical issues, we’ll have to contend with military presence and their logistics to protect key installations. Kind of like during the colonies, no ?
Yep, I see this whole thing as an enormous can of worms. Green my butt – the fuel budget for all those Hummers and helos is going to burn clear through any solar-powered offsetting the greenies could expect.
But, as has already been stated above, I’m probably worried for nothing : such an enormous undertaking will not even be started any time soon. Maybe not until the African continent has actually rammed into the European plate, crushed Italy and put Madrid on the same longitude as Paris.
And by then, there’s no guarantee that the Sahara will still be as useful, solar-wise.
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June 23rd, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Pascal: They’re on the other side of the Sahara.
Solar installations – assuming any actually ever get built – will be on the north coast (for water access), and the failed state mercenaries are all sub-Saharan, pretty much.
Even Sudan’s a very, very long desert trek away, with no way to get fuel or water, and Libya isn’t likely to take such things kindly.
So, the “roving gangs”? Not a problem, really.
The thing to remember is that Africa isn’t an amoeba.
It has distinct regions and geography, and the Sahara is very hostile to travel. The warlord types are all localized and far away from the northern edge, which is far stabler and richer (thanks to Mediterranean trade) than, say, Somalia.
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June 23rd, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Seriously, though, about the sand-blasting issue, I thought Sahara sand was heavy enough that it wouldn’t rise more than 30 or 40 feet off the ground most of the time. If you really wanted to, couldn’t you put the collectors on 50-foot poles (anchored into what, I don’t know) and avoid most of the damage?
Not that you wouldn’t eventually get a sandstorm that would ruin the whole setup, but still, I wonder if it might be possible to mitigate some of the routine damage.
George Carty said:
If the Western democracies wanted to do it, they could send a couple of nuclear engineers to Palestine to explain to the politicians what a LWR is and why it is less than useless for a nuclear weapons program. They could also threaten to cut off the unconditional flow of money and weapons that has so far enabled the colonialists there to even be able to consider attacking their neighbors when they don’t like something. In other words: it’s our fault those people are even there and it is possible to do something about it. What that would need is enough secular Arabs to move to Europe and the battleground states in the United States, get naturalized as citizens, and start voting as a bloc, to cancel out the colonialist vote. Once an election is explained by pundits as “well, this guy lost because he didn’t have the Arab vote,” politicians in the West will start paying attention to the global majorities. Hopefully they’ll do it before the global majorities use our capital to industrialize, then arm themselves and come after their former colonial rulers with a vengeance that’ll make World War II look like a little battle off in Poland somewhere.
Not trying to turn this into anything political, though.
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June 23rd, 2010 at 3:21 pm
Stewart Peterson said:
I’m not entirely sure. I do know that severe sand storms that can cause damage to even tall buildings in desert cities do happen on a fairly regular basis. It may be every few years that you get a really really severe one, but still, we’re talking about billions and billions and billions worth of mirrors and collectors. The fact that it happens only once in a while isn’t that much consolation.
Also, putting them on big poles would increase the cost by quite a lot and make maintenance more costly and difficult. (again, remember the sheer size of these things)
Even if it is not an issue of bad sand storms, the fine silica dust of the sand has a tendency to blow in the wind and in dry climates, the friction builds a static charge which causes it to cling to things. The effect ranges from mild at normal times to severe during sand storms, but with solar power something like that is really a critical issue. It tends to keep the window washers in places like Dubai and Cairo pretty busy keeping things from getting too bad.
A bit off topic, but perhaps interesting: Clinging layers of dust on the solar panels of the Mars Rovers have, at times caused reduced power of 30-40% and forced the rovers to be put into hibernation for days on end to charge their batteries. At least once, NASA got lucky and a small localized whirl wind blew much of the dust off one of the rovers and brought it back to more reasonable operating power levels.
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June 23rd, 2010 at 5:20 pm
One way or the other, this build would take place, and the apparatus would have to work reliably in on of the harshest environments on the planet. Not just sand, (which would be a problem) but huge day/night temperature swings, dessication, and wind would all take their toll on the equipment. Then there is the shear logistics of keeping the build crew supplied with food, water and accommodations in this place.
The closer you look at this, the stupider the idea is, and only verifies, in my mind that it is a cover for business as usual for fossil fuel.
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June 23rd, 2010 at 8:12 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Why didn’t it have some kind of self-cleaning mechanism? Is it really that difficult or heavy?
I’d think a small amount of compressed gas and a few evenly spaced nozzles could blow dust off even if the gas would be expanding rather more spherically in low atmospheric pressure. It would only need to carry enough gas for a few, short, sharp blasts so you wouldn’t have to rely on a dust devil to just happen to come by and clean the panels.
Why isn’t it possible to make a thin, rigid, lightweight brush that travels across the flat top of the robot, attached to tracks at both sides that drag it back and forth(sort of like the light/scanner thing in a copying machine). I know there’s a problem with partial shading, which reduces outputs of a PV panely by much more than the fraction of cells receiving shade, but I was under the impression this was just an economic tradeoff. If it gets stuck in a bad position after a few uses, well so what, it is shading only 16 cells horizontally across the PV module, out of a total of 384 cells or whatever.
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June 23rd, 2010 at 11:35 pm
Well, they landed in 2004 with an intended design life of 90 days, and the mission teams saying that they would have been fairly happy if they provided good data for 30 days and would be elated if they signifficantly exceeded the 90 day mission duration. And… that was six years ago.
So, they may not have really been worried about the long term accumulation of dust like that.
I’m not so sure whether compressed gas would be a real option. I mean, it weighs something and would be depleted pretty fast I’d imagine.
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June 24th, 2010 at 1:28 am
You are all so narrow minded. This is only what is needed now. Solar power research is needed because it can make it work better so you need less space. We need to do what we do with computers and make solar power advance the same. Double it every year. Double the power in each panel means half the space, so each year it is cut in half and that means after a few years it is less than one percent and a few years more and less than a thousand to one. That is why research is needed. If we do it with computers why not solar power? Likely because big companies are not jumping to do it.
What about cutting energy needs? We have less space needed if we need less energy, right? Look at what our lifestyles and consumption has done to the world! We have made pigs of ourselves! We need to stop living in excessively big houses, driving big cars. How many of us even need a car, really? Ever considered sharing one with many neighbors.
Even better, we would be healthier and happier. Things are changing. People are starting to grow tired of the old way of being a sick piggy and making the world a mess.
Why is it bad that these need many jobs? Jobs are good. If a solar power plant means more jobs than a dirty power plant then they have more people to work. Making good work is how we stop crime and terrorism.
Working at a solar power job would help make everyone much better people and much less prone to harming others. So many people think they find pleasure in using things they do not need. A solar job would make someone a better person. When you have a job like that you know you are doing something wonderful. what if we gave the people in Africa all jobs where they woke up and thought to themselves I am doing something wonderful to help earth and make good clean power to be proud of. We would no longer be in fear but now become friends.
Think this all over before talking about something like nuclear power. Nuclear is just back to being more sad angry unhealthy piggies.
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June 24th, 2010 at 2:51 am
pb said:
Irritatingly, in principle I basically agree with the principle that jobs > no jobs. But this bit above, hell no.
We’ve increased computer processing “power” but really that should read a processing speed. As anyone who’s been building their on PCs over the last decade or so will be able to tell you, all that extra speed has come at a cost – the cost of more power, more electricity. PC PSUs have expanded rapidly from the days when 250W would see you happy to 1kW not being enough.
But really that’s an aside, solar power is really a question of effiency. You can’t increase the amount of solar energy falling on a given area of land. You could use mirrors to focus it, but the mirrors cover an area, so you’re back to a constant figure of joules per metre-squared. Certain areas of the world receive more solar energy, a factor linked to both local weather systems and geographical location.
In terms of boosting the efficiency of solar cells, well yes, it’s probably feasible. A ilttle bit. But don’t get too excited about how far the efficiency can be pushed. Massive amounts of money are thrown at boosting the efficiency of the internal combustion engine and have resulted in gains of only a few percent. In terms of making use of the cheimcal energy theoretically available, IC engines don’t even reach 40% and we’ve been pushing them for years.
Of course, other big questions about solar plants still need to be asked and solved – mainly linked to the embodied energy consumption (the energy expended to manufacture them) and the chemical pollutants released during manufacture. Flatly, CO2 is not the only environmental concern which we as a race should be fretting about.
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June 24th, 2010 at 10:49 am
I’mnotreallyhere said:
Well, jobs are good if there’s a net increase, but you have to look at the bigger picture of the amount of labor you’re talking about and how it fits into the greater equation. If a project needs a lot of people to work there because it’s highly successful and growing quickly, then that’s great. However, if it’s going to take thousands to do a relatively small task, then we’re talking about something that is so labor intensive it’s going to be astronomically expensive.
Then the other side being if you have low production and high numbers of workers, then you can’t exactly afford to pay each of them well, because there’s too little revenue per worker.
Yes, jobs are good, but we can’t be too overly simplistic on this.
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June 24th, 2010 at 10:55 am
pb said:
Uh, well, to put it simply, the solar power systems we have now can do pretty good, all things considered, at turning light into usable energy. Light is a form of energy though, so there’s a limit to how much of it there is, and so efficiency is not open-ended. You obviously can’t go 100% when it comes to efficiency. However, really you can’t get close because you can hit something caled the “Carnot Limit” way before 100% and that is the true limit of thermal to mechanical power.
It’s not like computers with computing power. That’s not comperable at all. You’re thinking of Moore’s law, which basically states that roughly every year it will become possible to cram twice as many transistors into an IC at the same price. This also means the same number can be crammed into half the space and this increases speed because less distance for the electricity to travel.
It’s just not the same kind of issue.
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June 24th, 2010 at 11:07 am
I am getting really annoyed with the hypocrisy of the renewable supporters that that blithely expect everyone to accept the premise that future developments in their favoured technology will solve all outstanding problems there are with it, but refuse to recognize that there are real and existing solutions to those issues with nuclear that they endlessly come up with. Nuclear is now ready to bear the load of powering this civilisation, carbon-free and for as long as it is needed to. It doesn’t have to wait on new developments, and those units that are built now will serve now exactly as they promise to do; name-plate capacity, is operational capacity, not 8% of it.
Nuclear power can delver the goods right now, why should we wait for some miracle in storage or photovoltaics that might never come?
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June 24th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
pb said:
We’re not unimaginative. It’s a matter of physical limits; if the energy isn’t there, a solar panel – which works by collecting energy – can’t collect it. See below.
pb said:
Because the physical limit for the size of a transistor is one atom. A transistor is basically an automatic switch; computers use billions of transistors already, and more transistors fitting into a smaller space means more processing (switching) power. We’re not close to one atom yet, so it will keep improving for a while – but it won’t improve forever. There is a real limit to what can be done with computers, and we know what it is. Eventually, we will reach it, and unfortunately, with solar panels, we already have.
The physical limit for the amount of energy collected by a solar panel is around 0.17 horsepower per square foot, simply because that’s the amount of energy in sunlight by the time it reaches the Earth’s orbit. A compact car, producing 100 horsepower, would have to use a 20 by 30 foot solar panel to collect it all. Just to be perfectly clear, that’s the amount that it can collect, not the amount that a currently-existing commercially-viable solar panel actually does collect. That’s assuming no sunlight is scattered or absorbed by the atmosphere – and if that were the case, the sky wouldn’t be blue from all the scattered blue light, and everybody would have terminal sunburn from the ultraviolet light that the ozone layer absorbes – plus no clouds, no night, and complete, total, 100% perfect efficiency.
In other words, there’s a good reason solar power works great in space and nowhere else.
pb said:
There are plenty of big companies jumping all over each other to do it. Believe it or not, there are other explanations for events than “who did it.” “What is happening,” on the physical level, is a good question to ask sometimes for people who are used to thinking socially, just like geeks would do well to think about people sometimes. Do your part in bridging that cultural gap.
pb said:
Unfortunately, if you cut energy use, the price of non-renewable fuels will drop from less demand, and you’ll end up undercutting yourself. New clean energy facilities need a demand for their services in order to be built, and the only way to provide that demand is, counterintuitively, to use more energy.
pb said:
What about all the people who don’t have a consistent supply of energy right now? Don’t they have as much of a right to it as we do? Are you going to tell a guy who’s up to his waist in a rice paddy in Bangladesh that he needs to use less energy, to save the Earth?
pb said:
Submitting yourself to a collective agenda works great until you have an unpopular idea. What if all these people decide collectively to do something that’s unethical? If every decision you make has to be approved by somebody else, even if that somebody is a democratic or communal group, you don’t have much freedom.
I don’t conspicuously consume either. But I respect others’ right to waste their money, for the same reason that I support their right to go to a Baptist church, even though I wouldn’t: I know that if I made their private (i.e., not any of my business) decisions a matter of public policy, they could make mine a matter of public policy too. Then none of us would be free. We’d all be under each other’s boots. And it would all be perfectly democratic: two wolves and one sheep voting on what’s for dinner.
pb said:
People are healthier than they’ve ever been in human history. Entire diseases have been wiped out completely. Life expectancy is longer than it ever has been. Going back to the old days, before industrialization, would be a human disaster. Notice, for all the dirty conditions of the early Industrial Revolution, that nobody who had been in both places ever tried to go back to subsistence farming.
pb said:
Do you want to pay their salaries in the form of higher energy prices? It might sound a little cold, but taking money from one guy and giving it to somebody else hurts the first guy as much as it helps the second one. Remember the old thought experiment where if everybody in the city gave you a dollar, you’d be a millionaire and they wouldn’t notice? Well, think about it in reverse: you can ruin a millionaire and the people you’re trying to help won’t even remember it in a week.
pb said:
Yep, there’s a term for a work environment that’s designed to produce attitude change: “boot camp.” Having it be a communist boot camp doesn’t make it any better.
Deciding what the best attitude is for everybody to have is incompatible with a free country. What if I decided what would make you a better person, and decided to shut down all other jobs so that you would have no alternative but to work in a place that would make you act the way I wanted you to act?
Go read 1984. Seriously, go read 1984. It’s a comment on the failings of the left, not the right. Power corrupts. Placing an organization in a position where it doesn’t have to listen to its customers, clients, members, or citizens, won’t make it stop trying to get things for itself at the expense of others. It will only accelerate the process, and remove any ability for anyone else to stop it. Put simply, benevolent institutions aren’t. They can be quite democratic, checking everything past a majority vote before allowing it to happen, but all that does is reduce everything to the lowest common denominator.
pb said:
“Gave?” We have unemployment ourselves; we don’t have jobs sitting around to “give” to people. Jobs have to be made, not given, by creating conditions where people want to spend money.
Take this for example. Let’s say a college student buys (i.e., gets a mortgage for) a small house, and rents space to fellow students. The cost has gone up since the 80s, when this happened, but let’s use the numbers from back then: say the mortgage is $800 a month, divided by four guys. That’s $200 a month, and nobody, now or then, could get an apartment for $200 a month that anybody would want to live in. So, let’s say the guy charges $500 a month rent, when landlords in the area are charging $600 a month for an apartment. He’s happy, because he’s making $2000 a month for an $800 outlay, the renters are happy, because they’re spending $100 less every month than they otherwise would, and the bank is happy, because they’re making 5% interest on the whole thing. Nobody’s being exploited.
Contrast that with a communal situation, where an institution “provides” everything. The whole economic picture is different. Now, the entity – whatever it is – that is “providing” a communal living space doesn’t get any advantage from doing their job better. If the place is a palace, they get paid. If the place is a fleabag, they get paid. People living there can’t get up and leave if they don’t like it, because they didn’t get themselves into it. They don’t have any agency in the situation. There is no resource (money, in the example above) that they can take out of a situation they don’t like and apply differently. So the institution, looking to minimize their own costs of “providing” this bare minimum that wouldn’t result in an armed rebellion, creates cookie-cutter apartments and dorms – which everybody moves out of the first chance they get.
My conclusion? Institutions settle for the lowest common denominator, and don’t respond to the individual. Only each individual knows what works for them, in their situation. Let people do what suits them instead of trying to decide what’s best for everybody.
pb said:
So public policy should be made on the basis of how it makes you feel? Don’t you guys like to call yourselves the reality-based community? Where’s the reality in thinking that the physical world exists to make you feel good?
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June 24th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
The idea that solar power sector jobs will solve all the social problems of the world because people will be so full of happiness and satisfaction at the idea that they are doing something wonderful for the earth is pure fantasy.
I have recently done work for a company that helps people with minor disabilities find gainful employment and runs a vocational work program to help get them started. In the past I’ve done volenteer work for various groups that I support as well a for animal shelters.
It’s true that there is something to be said for the intangable benefits of feeling satisfaction at helping do something good, but lets get real about this, it doesn’t mean that I dance a jig out of bed every morning or that I am so full of euphoria that I am immune to all social stresses or ever being unhappy.
the idea that solar power sector jobs somehow are going to create such a completely perfect socially-engineered existence for entire societies is ridiculous.
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June 24th, 2010 at 5:54 pm
These schemes exist more for the purpose of collecting European subsidies than Saharan sunshine.
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June 25th, 2010 at 11:23 am
I believe I read about Desertec a few months ago.
It’s planned to be 1000+ separate solar projects all around the Mediterranean.
2/3 of the electricity generated is supposed to be intended for the host countries, only 1/3 for Europe.
And even *that* is predicated on a hope for invention of affordable long-distance transmission technology.
Europe will spend billions to prop up corrupt incompetent north African dictatorships, is what this boils down to.
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June 25th, 2010 at 11:27 am
DV82XL said:
Yeah!
What he said!
That irrationally anti-nuke generation is past its prime. The last relics will be on social security in a decade; they can’t block solutions to our problems for much longer.
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June 25th, 2010 at 11:39 am
drbuzz0 said:
Once you isolate the hydrogen, you use the hydrogen to create DME.
That addresses most of your objections to hydrogen, I think.
drbuzz0 said:
If you want to get the electricity to southern Italy, no problem. If you want to transmit the electricity to Germany, I think the transmission losses would be at least an order of magnitude higher, even using transmission technology that today is much more expensive.
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June 28th, 2010 at 4:11 am
My God! The cost presented is staggering. $495 Billion for ONE of the projects.
The US Dept of Energy says that in 2006 Europe had approx. 810 GW installed electric generating capacity, 458 GW of that being conventional thermal (read fossil fuel) generation.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/elec.html
Depleted Cranium argues the cost of nuclear power at approximately $1 Billion per GW, a price that is artificially high, but a nice round number for back-of-the-envelope calculations.
http://depletedcranium.com/hope-this-works/
So at a simplistic first glance, rather than spending $495 Billion on one of the projects in the long-term scheme to produce solar power in North Africa for consumption in Europe, producers could install close to 500 GW of nuclear generating capacity, more than sufficient to displace 100% of the Continent’s fossil fuel generation. That’s completely ignoring the variability in costs inherent in massively upscaling the industry, but I have to believe that the order of magnitude will not change.
A climate scientist named V. Ramanathan suggested that spending $46 Trillion on carbon cuts would be 1/3 of the “climate solution.” Forget the fact that by saying 46 Trillion he might as well be saying “a bazillion,” but by the same set of figures I used for Europe, $2.75 Trillion would build enough nuclear capacity to completely displace the world’s fossil fuel generation capacity. I’d say that would get us a lot farther than 1/3 of the way there at 6% of the price.
Why are these greens so comfortable thowing around such insanely huge numbers?
1) Hey, it’s not their money.
2) They’re setting themselves up to blame “lack of funding” for their projects’ failures.
3) If anything close to those sums gets allocated, they’ll be in line to rake in massive grants and subsidies.
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