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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Whenever i see reference to New Scientist, the phrase “Now your hands please” springs to mind.
Brits of a certain vintage might get the reference.
The only thing this plan is missing is the Underpants Gnomes.
Stage 1: Build Solar panels and Superconductive power lines.
Stage 2: ?????
Stage 3: Profit!
This project is one of those PV automobile experiments that you read about their race conducted once a year on a giant scale. 1 part science, 1 part mental masturbation, 0 parts practical engineering. Like the comment about using super conductivity to transmit coal genrated power from Wyoming. Why, again, is it so urgently necessary that our electricity must come directly from the sun or once removed in the form of wind?
Probably not in the Sahara. Wouldn’t be “energy independent.”
Probably no bio-engineered organisms either. Can’t wait for the China Syndrome movie equivalent of GM bacteria. Or was that the Blob?
Here in Africa, liberating copper power lines is a widespread and well organised trade. Super cooled might test the ingenuity for a week or two.
Actually the goal of the project is laudable – both in creating alternative energy as well as technology transfers to North Africa and human development via education.
However, the grimy details are what make this grandiose proposal utterly impractical.
1) While Silicon may be the 2nd most common substance in the earth’s crust, this applies just as much to anywhere else in the world as it does the Sahara
2) Conversion of Saharan sand to silicon doesn’t in and of itself yield commercial grade solar panels. The conversion itself costs a massive amount of money – a polysilicon plant costs in the order of $125/kg in capital. A 3000 ton/year polysilicon plant thus costs in the order of $375M dollars to build and must then achieve high or full utilization in order to fully depreciate.
A solar panel plant is then needed to actually convert the polysilicon into a solar panel – such a plant costs in the order of $400M.
3) Solar panels require a lot more than just sand: rare earths among others. Where is this to come from?
4) The massive amounts of superconducting cables also require tremendous investment – both in materials and in money.
Note the above numbers only involve a single vertical loop – and costs in the order of $1B plus operational costs in the 8 digit range.
To scale this to cover the entire Sahara – we’re talking decades’ worth of the entire GNP of the entire North Sahara region.
Looks like another perpetual motion machine to me. Cooling the power lines will generate more heat than we are currently worried about and the whole thing will eat power.
Not shown in the illustration: the 750 MW nuclear plant that powers the whole mess (it’s just off to the right, beyond the edge of the page).
Regards,
Ric
Due to their variability, going above 30% solar/wind makes a power grid unstable.
EIA levelized cost puts solar thermal cheaper per kw/hr than solar PV.
As mentioned, keeping solar collectors/PVs clean is a high water demand issue.
Like several others, I want to see an energy budget for this project, because I don’t think it even works at the Energy Return On Investment (EROI) level. Which would mean that it doesn’t “breed” at all.
I worked in the Sahara for 5 years on oilfield surveying. One of the most difficult tasks I faced was finding sand. Yes sand for concrete which was necessary for all the oilfield installations. You’d be surprised at how difficult it is to find good quality, clean graded sand. There’s plenty of dust, and white powders from salt and other residues, but it’s just not like one of those movies with Nomads on camels wandering accross endless oceans of dunes. It’s mostly rock and dust.
Also there are two winds, which blow most days, the one from the north can be cold, especially in winter (I have seen it snow in winter), and in summer the wind known as the Ghibli is hot and dry from the south. Both of these winds are permanently dusty, and I’d just love to see the maintenance staff keeping the solar cells clean. When the wind blows over 10 mph, it acts like a sand blaster, and erases paint from vehicles, and etches the glass on windshields.
Yes folks, the desert looks pretty benign on nature films, but in reality it is a very aggressive place to survive, and I wouldn’t give their nice equipment much chance of surviving the first full year.
This is like selling mirror pieces and color bracelets to indigenous people. After Cancun’s debacle there will be a big, big worldwide SALE of Solar Cells, Fancy Wind Mills, and the like.
If my memory is correct, isn’t this how the machines in The Matrix got their start?
Dave Springer says:
December 3, 2010 at 4:43 am
“E.M.Smith says:
December 3, 2010 at 4:14 am
“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.”
Thankfully you’re not doing it. Solar thermal is and will continue to be hobbled by the need for heat engines to convert heat to mechanical energy and then generators to convert mechanical to electrical energy. Photovoltaic is solid state – no moving parts. Comparing the two is like comparing an abacus to an electronic calculator.”
Dave is right. The German Club Of Rome has this Desertec initiative that wants to build solar thermal in the Sahara; Polly “Ecocide” Higgins works for them; Siemens and RWE are behind it.
RWE builds a solar thermal plant in Spain ATM; this is intended to be a proof of concept plant for Desertec. The idea is to store heat in salt to be able to run generators at night on the stored heat as well as during the day.
Now, they say, it is MORE expensive than the same capacity in PV – but with the experience they will gain they will be able to build the next plant 30% cheaper, and maybe then it will be able to compete with PV. The problem with this reasoning is that PV is getting cheaper all the time as well as silicon gets cheaper and companies are forced to live with reduced subsidies in Germany – it was the high level of subsidies that kept prices high.
So both of these technologies get cheaper; solar thermal is behind on the learning curve. PV might well stay ahead. The price of silicon PV has already dropped so much that thin film PV doesn’t have much of an advantage anymore.
All this being said, the generated PV electricity is still unable to compete with old fossil fuels and this might stay so for another 15 years.
But whether solar thermal will ever become cheaper than PV is still an open question.
Here’s a German article about the RWE project:
http://www.ftd.de/unternehmen/industrie/:strom-aus-der-wueste-lernstunden-fuer-desertec/50181048.html
G-d, these people annoy me.
Do you think we can rely on Gadaffi and the Mslim Brotherhood for our future enrgy supplies? I seem to remember that R Reagan was bombing the place a few decades ago.
Why is it that not a single idea or proposal from these Green-loons has any practical value whatsoever…?
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What kind of power grid turns off every night? And where does all the power come from to keep the high temperature transmission lines cool after the the sun sets slowly in the west? Perhaps they could use wind energy as a backup twixt dusk and dawn, just to be on the safe side.
If somebody were to desire a presentation to explain deceit and fraud this one would be an excellent choice.
It looks so easy…
But didn’t they forgot the <and the magic happens here> step.
What about the cost and materials necessary to keep replicating these plants? What about the environmental destruction from the toxic chemicals that will be used?
MikeEE
Its 2010, were is my flying car. They promised me a flying car. I want my flying car!
It will be the eco-kooks themselves that prevent future projects of this type from happening…that rare turtle, mouse, etc will prevent any construction
Insulating the wires shouldn’t be that much of a problem. While cat fur may not have much insulation value, surely enough of it wrapped around the wires would serve the purpose. And to get that endless supply of cat fur we need only employ Heinlein’s perpetual fur farm. You start with a batch of rats and cats. You feed the rats to the cats, then skin the cats and feed the carcasses to the rats. Before long, you’ve got enough cat fur to insulate anything.
Does anyone realize that you cannot make PV cell manufacturing plants or superconducting power lines out of silcon? Electricity is not what you need to make a new plant, you need…raw materials and manufacuring equipment that will not be made in the Sahara! How, then can this be called a “breeder” project?
Ralph says:
December 3, 2010 at 8:29 am
” Why is it that not a single idea or proposal from these Green-loons has any practical value whatsoever…?”
–because environmentalism isn’t so much a science as it is a quasi-religion or ideology.
When one thinks in quasi-religious or ideological terms instead of practical scientific
ones, the ideas that one might come up with when engaging in problem-solving are
bound to be impractical and/or lacking in scientific soundness.
Those are quite literally the last two adjectives I would use to describe environmentalists.
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HUMBLE AND MODEST
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Any thought put into the ecology of the deserts, oh right nothing lives there, my bad.
I am a retired power dispatcher and controlled power systems and understand the dynamics of interconnected power systems and the thought of trying to keep a system like this stable world wide blows me away. Besides all or most power from one or few sources would be a terrorists wet dream. Besides not enough power from that one source and would need backup, oh right nuclear backup, now there is a thought.
In thepost:
Be very careful….the “Gore Effect” may turn those deserts into glaciers…
Funny how a computer and some animation software can fool some folks into feeling “empowered”.