Or, “how to make pie in the sky using our simple recipe”. From the New Scientist, making solar power is just as easy as building a few factories in the middle of the Sahara Desert and then making solar cells out of the sand to make electricity, which will be transported around the planet by a supercooled superconductor transmission system. Gosh, impressive, and easy as pie. Watch the video below to see just how easy it all is.
The Sahara Solar Breeder Project is a joint initiative by universities in Japan and Algeria that aims to build enough solar power stations by 2050 to supply 50 per cent of the energy used by humanity.
The idea is to begin by building a small number of silicon manufacturing plants in the Sahara, each turning the desert sand into the high-quality silicon needed to build solar panels. Once those panels are operating, some of the energy they generate will be used to build more silicon plants, each churning out more solar panels and generating more energy that can be used to build even more plants, and so on.
Hideomi Koinuma at the University of Tokyo leads the Japanese end of the project. He admits that making silicon panels from the rough sands of the Sahara or other deserts has not been attempted before, but says it is a logical choice.
“From the viewpoints of quality, quantity and chemistry, Sahara sand is hard to beat for use as silicon for solar cells,” he says.
…
Koinuma wants to use “high-temperature” superconductors to distribute the power as direct current – more efficient than a conventional alternating current. Despite their name, high-temperature superconductors typically operate at around -240 °C, and the long power lines will require a formidable cooling system.
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I like it! Granted I don’t believe they’ll reach their goals, in fact I doubt they will get up to more than a few plants before funding is cut, but I like the idea of “mining” sand for silicon. Also I believe solar power has great potential, and the only way it will reach that potential is if people have sufficient motivation to improve and cheapen solar power technology. And getting the most profit on a whole bunch of solar power plants is definately sufficient motivation.
There have been suggestions from Cancun that we humans could consider carbon rationing, the introduction of wide spread diseases and mass suicide to protect the planet. While I wait for those making the recommendations to go first so we can see if their proposals are effective I suppose turning the Sahara into a giant PV is less threatening.
I missed out on an university education and so have had to live a reasonably sucessful life using common sense and observation. At no time have I realised that my very existence was causing such heartache to the learned. OTOH we could just ignore their ramblings as they cry for relevance.
The word, ‘humanity’, is an abstraction and has nothing to do with actual people’s lives.
Ok. Let’s assume the technical hurdle’s can be surmounted.
How many people would even consider leaving their power in the hands of whatever thugs happen to be running the saharan states?
For me, that could also work on planet Mars!
These guys don’t have a clue!
Ecotretas
Looks so easy I start tomorrow. Oops, we are snowed in at the moment so will have to put this project off.
Looks so easy on paper, or Power Point. But near to impossible in reality.
Best idea is to use fossil fuels and perfect bio-digestion for methane production for electricity generation. The extra CO2 will help grow more crops to feed the masses.
Why can’t they just be honest and call it what it really is? A perpetual motion machine.
Still, if it is funded solely by middle east oil money, it isn’t all bad.
Read “Engineers Dreams” by Willie Ley published back in the 1950,s for much easier
ways of producing free power!
“Despite their name, high-temperature superconductors typically operate at around -240 °C, and the long power lines will require a formidable cooling system.”
I’m guessing the cooling system will need most of the energy the solar panels will produce.
I thought about this breeder concept a while ago. The problem is that at the moment, producing the solar cell costs as much energy as it will deliver back in 10,000 hours of peak energy production. This might be achieved in the Sahara in about 5 years (wild guesstimate; i didn’t look up the number of sunshine hours they have their but i know it would be 13 years with Germany’s 780 peak sunshine hours equivalent per year).
So, with what would you bootstrap the process? Why would anyone want to produce that stuff in the Sahara when it’s probably much cheaper and faster to just produce it wherever we produce it now and move it there.
What’s lacking is not the sand, not the silicon, not the energy, not the workers – what’s lacking is a business case.
How much CO2 will be generated in providing thousands of miles of superconducting super-fluids? OMG!
Too much grant money being generated on hopeless projects. Spend the money on Nuclear and Coal and Gas and Oil and get back to reality!
Sadly, this is about the best solar idea I’ve ever seen, IF it wasn’t for the fact that if centralized power generation with long transmission lines were that great of an idea, someone would have done it already. Keeping power lines only a few degrees from 0 K is also going to be about the most inefficient thing I’ve heard of.
Anyone with a solid understanding of the amount of energy required to keep cool, say, 10,000 miles of power cable at -240 C should do some napkin math to figure it out… I really don’t know enough about supercold insulations, but the gradient being what it would, I’d imagine there’s at least a significant amount of heat transfer that can’t be avoided.
I’m definitely willing to bet that given the overall shortcomings of solar power that
1) when it’s night on the Sahara, and the solar stops flowing, the lines will have to be maintained at that temp by more conventional means, the energy drain from this will likely mean that coal or nuclear plants will need to be built to support the infrastructure, making the whole process pretty futile.
2) It’s the Sahara… you picked it because there’s lots of sand and sun, but there’s also sandstorms… how much is the small army that will be required to keep cleaning the cells going to cost?
3) Of course, this is assuming that this person is actually trying to build a market viable strategy… if this is another watermelon pushing an economically suicidal idea that won’t do half of what it’s planned to do, and will cost 3 arms and 4 legs each to reach 25%, never mind 50%, then it will hopefully be ignored, once we all get a good laugh at the horror story of the economics involved.
Wind energy fairs are always fun for this reason. There are always people there pushing their high-temp superconductors for generator windings. The conversation usually goes something like this:
“So, I should buy a generator that uses your high-temp superconductor for my turbine design?”
“Yes! You’ll be cool and everyone will like you! It makes the puppies happy! It’s a SUPER conductor. Don’t you want SUPER turbines?”
“Yes, quite. So, this ‘high’ temperature, what is it exactly?”
“Er, about 100K.”
“And how much energy does it take to keep the generator at 100K?”
“Not much!”
“How much?”
“Er, about 50kW.”
“So, about 10% of my average energy capture?”
“Er, yes.”
“And what are my bearing lubricants going to look like at 40K?”
“Er, well…”
“Come on…”
“Er, solid. But we can sell you super-dooper low temperature lubricants…”
“Thanks for your time, goodbye.”
I concur, that ought to be a rather simple project what with their only gonna be .0001‰ of people having access to electricity in the year 2050. The only sane people left that stuck to their guns, all living in the same walled city protected from all the crazed environuts (that would be all them poor sods that were stricken by the crazed envirohippie bug) that are roaming “free” in the country side gobbling up all the animals as the frakking please. Of course a story is nothing without the antagonists so the frakking c[r]ockroaches, err sorry crazed hippie climate communists, are still going in their lovely “mud” (they call it mud still because it used to be mud once upon a time) pie city called, of bloody course, Utopia. However they’re living on diminishing returns what with their recent bout into doom and gloom of starvation, and since they are ever so natural living one with gaia, what better snack then exist than once own neighbor?
But pretty soon the “natural” utopians realizes that, hey this isn’t how was supposed to be? So what options do they have, but yet again influences the masses, the mobs, the animal gobblers, and attack that heinous vile despicable fusion powered (by old oil and old coal, bleh) flowery bounti-beautiful watery gardens, aptly named, after 30 years deliberations and debate until bossmann authoritarilly decided with his schtick up panzer pantz rump, instead (because there comes a time, even in manns history, when one has to take command and show who’s really the bossmann) Dystopia (which they still laugh, evilly, at, as their only inside joke, about every friday night after “Billy’s” BBQ, poking fun at that lonely coal heap of remains at the end of a hard week, so to speak.)
“Well, we can research it for $100 million yen, but gosh, we’ll need a lot more to make this happen. And hey…just make that check out to ‘cash’. I’ll take care of it. Really.”
Whilst my first response to this is that it sounds like ‘pie in the sky’, it would be interesting to see a detailed rebuttal showing how the costings do not stack up. I am sure there are plenty of people who will fall for this, particularly as it is in a ‘science’ magazine.
Not sure why they would not stand a chance. The technology seems that it would have to be worked out, and I’m dubious about the cost of cooling helium to send power (I’d have thought being underground at a few degrees C would be enough for DC, but hey).
I would be very dubious about:
1. Water to clean the panels
2. Sandstorms (as the guy says)
3. Political problems in that part of the world (notice none of the interested parties actually LIVE there?)
4. Security of the power lines (related to (3)).
5. Masses of energy in the day and none at night (when all those electric cars are being charged).
Now, if only the Sahara weren’t an incredibly unstable area, politically. Any plants and transmission lines would be subject to protection rackets and practically indefensible.
How many divisions will bee needed to guard it?
It’s Edison vs. Tesla redux.
It won’t work at night and at a reduced capacity when cloudy….. and it would cost more than it is worth trying to keep the dust and sand off the solar panels…… The whole thing is impractical and laughable…. and wildly expensive…. and typical of the Green Communists.
Looks to me like someones ego is WAY bigger than his paycheck and he wants a sugardaddy…
IFF I was going to do this, I’d make it solar thermal rather than PV. Cheaper to do by far and you can still make your mirrors out of sand / glass.
The notion that folks would be building whole new ‘sand up’ manufacturing and dotting these things around the desert is just nuts. It’s far cheaper and easier to move the sand to a factory near things like, oh, water, power, transport (for all the OTHER materials you will need), labor supply (and the attendant housing and entertainment) and all the rest.
Oh, and we’ve built a bunch of massive solar farms now (at least 2 that I remember in the Mojave alone, plus those in Spain). Last I looked none of them were making much / any money. I don’t see how putting it further out in a more hostile desert and further from markets that need the product will be improving the economics any…
Damn you, Erik! Damn you, sir! You got there first.
Just imagine this would really work and every one would want the solar energy. Just imagine how filthy rich those guys will get, but the worst would be the solar energy would be cheap and abundant (IF it worked like proposed, probably not).
And then imagine how Green Peace and our greener friends will start to cry and count 1345 reasons why this form of solar energy will lead straight to Armageddon.
Solar and wind are only “environmentally friendly” as long as they push energy prices to the sky and make energy scare.
THOU SHALT BE HUMBLE AND MODEST
this is what it is all about, not solving energy problems.
“Despite their name, high-temperature superconductors typically operate at around -240 °C, and the long power lines will require a formidable cooling system.”
Despite this being a science blog there’s often a dearth of it.
-240C (30 Kelvin) is the transition point between traditional (BCS theory) superconductivity and high-temperature superconductivity. BCS theory predicted that 30K was the highest possible temperature where superconductivity could exist.
In 1986 a new class of superconductor was discovered in materials where the mechanism was different than BCS. There is no theory for superconductivity in these materials.
By 2009 at least three superconductors had been discovered that operate at temperatures above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen 77K with one as high as 133K.
As of today the record for superconductivity is with a cupric oxide compound (Tl4Ba)Ba2MgCu8O13+. It superconducts at temperatures up to -8C (17F).
The holy grail is a room temperature superconductor. So far we’ve got up to household freezer temperature. There is no “typical” operating temperature for high-temperature superconductors and if there was it would certainly be above the definitional minimum of 30K.
Current record holder:
http://www.superconductors.org/254K.htm