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.
yeah….
while you guys get this all worked out, i’m going out for a beer.
So to get out of dependence of oil from “disliked” regimes they propose to get half of the world’s energy from – “disliked” regimes. Are these installations and transmission lines to be guarded by – The Marines to ensure uninterrupted supply?????
c1ue says:
December 3, 2010 at 6:53 am
Which ones? I thought the dopants were things like phosphorus and other elements in columns close to silicon in the periodic table.
Jack says:
December 3, 2010 at 1:22 am
> Why can’t they just be honest and call it what it really is? A perpetual motion machine.
It’s not – perpetual motion machines can work at night.
Of course this will work. It is using other people money. Would a bank loan money for this? I hope not.
It will work if they put a Nuke plant next door for the the times when the sun doesn’t shine.
“Split Atoms,not Birds.”
I figured I’d do a rough sanity check on this scheme.
Average solar energy during daylight is 680W/m^2. OK, that’s a bunch. But the theoretical maximum efficiency of a silicon pv cell is 29%. Best case recovery? 192w/m^2. The integral from sunrise through solar noon to sunset is 5hrs×max output. Thus, that 1 square meter pv yields 986WHrs per day, but let’s call it a kWHr, or 365kWHr/year. Aside from total energy production, a poster above quoted somebody (sorry, I keep missing where I saw it), that a 100gW capacity was expected from the project. Do they really think they will cover 100,000kM^2 with pv cells, and produce twice the world’s output of energy?
In 2005, world electric production totaled 18,235,102gWHr. To match that, 49,959,183,561 sq meters of pvs are needed. Call it 49,959kM^2 (about 19,515 sq. miles). But, (again with the buts) a given pv only give 5 hours worth of energy, so those pv farms are needed in a band around the world.
The only reasonable latitudes for these farms are the Horse Latitudes, where circulation patterns cause an almost perpetual high pressure and clear, dry weather. That’s 30-35 degrees north and south. Higher latitudes suffer from a lower angle of solar incidence and inclement weather, and the tropics offer almost daily rain (rain forests ring a bell? and who’s going to let you cut down the trees for your pv farm?). The Horse Latitudes are the homes of the Arabian, Sahara, and Sonora deserts in the northern hemisphere, and the Kalahari, Atacama, and Australian deserts in the southern.
So now we’re at 50,000 square kilometers of photo-voltaic farms without accounting for transmission, transformation, or other losses, nor have we any excess capacity to allow for units undergoing out of service maintenance. Plus we still have a problem with gaps in the schedule. As the sun crosses the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, capacity will be lost for several hours until the next farm comes into view, so to speak. It doesn’t help that the deserts align themselves fairly close longitudinally; Sonora/Atacama, Sahara/Kalahari, but not so much the Arabian/Australian deserts.
I noticed the speaker in the video couldn’t seem to stop grinning, as if he were playing a massive joke. If he was really serious, he’s another example of one’s education exceeding his capacity for comprehension.
cheers,
gary
Did anybody learn anything from the Suez Canal crisis? Please tell me Europe has politicians that read anything beyond the popular press. If this gets financed by EU money and becomes nationalized be Algeria and Libya then its call to arms and revolution is a must.
And if you believe this, here in my suitcase i have a very fine perpetual motion machine, and an elixir for converting base metals into gold.
Any offers?
The Sun is always shining on half the planet. Solar would be more viable if you could economically link both halves. Barring Tesla’s suggestions, you could, for example, link up South America and southern Africa by running cables across Antarctica. The local temperatures could help with the cooling of any superconductors. Likewise link North America, Europe and Asia through the Arctic. A bit more work on a worldwide electrical grid, make enough solar stations, then current from PV will be available 24/7, sourced from somewhere, and can properly be used for base load and displace Filthy Evil Fossil Fuel Burning plants.
Then comes the massive super-volcano eruption.
Paul Milligan
you have nailed it. this is just like the how to do it sketch from Monty Python. What a waste of energized electons.
Has anyone brought up the fact that sand is a finite resource? How long would it take to reach “Peak Sand?”
This project will undoubtedly get billion$ in support from the Dr. Chu and the current U.S. Dept. of Energy…
Do these people understand geopolitical realities? If the Sahara becomes an essential source of electricity for Europe , the supply lines will inevitably become a target for terrorist attacks or state takeover.
To protect those supply lines will Europe recolonise Northern Africa?
So many issues around poverty, health and welfare need to be tackled before any scheme like this could even begin to approach reality.
Ric Werme says:
December 3, 2010 at 10:30 am
“c1ue says:
December 3, 2010 at 6:53 am
3) Solar panels require a lot more than just sand: rare earths among others. Where is this to come from?
Which ones? I thought the dopants were things like phosphorus and other elements in columns close to silicon in the periodic table.”
He’s right for First Solar’s CdTE Cadmium-Telluride thin film cells. Telluride is a rare earth.
They are going to need a lot of wind-breaks around those solar PV power plants. Saharan wind storms are vicious, and nothing like wind-blown sand to ruin a few billion dollars worth of PV cells.
Then there is the wind-blown dust to contend with, setting aside the sand-blasting particles. Removing the dust regularly and gently will require some water or gentle puffs of air. Cannot use salt water because that leaves a residue of salt on the PV cells, which blocks some of the sunlight. Thus, must use fresh or distilled water – not plentiful nor cheap in the Sahara.
Not to mention grid-scale (planetary scale?) power storage systems to allow power to flow at twilight and night.
Good luck, gentlemen.
HTS transmission cable operates at just below liquid nitrogen temperature (77K) and losses are of the order of 1W/m of cable (not strongly dependent on capacity) plus 30-45W/kW/termination. HTS wire is currently an order of magnitude more expensive than Cu normalised for current carrying capacity (wire cost only), but that is variously forecast to fall to match Cu once manufacturing volumes increase.
So if this application was a genuine goer HTS DC transmission cable is very likely to be the best transmission solution in the time frames being contemplated.
It’s the rest of it you’d need to worry about.
Should have been clear in previous comment that losses refer to DC cable. HTS AC cables have additional losses and these are capacity dependent.
They will have to hurry, as the PV manufacturing industry is shifting away from silicon to vapor deposited thin films. http://www.solarbuzz.com/ Also, if the $5,000 per installed KW is real, it’s about twice the price of Tessera Stirling cycle solar power units. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evkuwvKJ-c The first minute of the video is marketing; it gets to real hardware after that.
PV is fine for small scale power plants that compete with retail electricity, but their need for inverters makes them uncompetitive at utility scale. Today
One question: What is the Energy Returned On Energy Invested for this project?
Anyone????
I think this is probably doable. In 2100. When the inhabitants of the region have become more civilized and mankind has made huge leaps technologically. In the meanwhile we have to rely on fossil and fission.
I smell an IMF/Gov’t grant
DirkH says:
December 3, 2010 at 1:47 pm
> He’s right for First Solar’s CdTE Cadmium-Telluride thin film cells. Telluride is a rare earth.
According to http://periodictable.com/ (don’t go there, you may never get out), Tellurium is in the same column as oxygen, sulfur, selenium, and polonium, i.e. Group 6.
It’s not a rare earth.
Theodore Gray has some samples from Colorado. I’m not sure if Tellurium is named for Telluride Colorado or its the other way around.
I was amazed that I read all of the comments so far, and nobody mentioned the problem that would be posed to the transmission lines by plate tectonics.
Interestingly, I had read about 2/3 of the comments before anybody brought up the difficulty posed by sandstorms.
Give the guys a break and evaluate the real issues. These guys are at least working on the long term problem of what do we do after the oil and coal run out. Check out earlier studies:
Energy from the Desert: Feasibility of Very Large Scale Photovoltaic Power Generation (VLS-PV) Systems (v. 1) [Hardcover]
Energy From the Desert: Practical Proposals for Very Large Scale Photovoltaic Systems (v. 2) [Hardcover]
Kosuke Kurokawa (Editor), Keiichi Komoto (Editor), Peter van der Vleuten (Editor), David Faiman (Editor)
Cool Englishman above has the most important comment re availability of sand, and wind/sand erosion.
Financing Concentrating Solar Power in the Middle
East and North Africa – Subsidy or Investment?
FRANZ TRIEB, HANS MÜLLER-STEINHAGEN, JÜRGEN KERN
Submitted to Energy Policy on July 6, accepted on October 1, 2010
ON PV payback,
Erik Alsema, Senior researcher at Utrecht University, The Netherlands
For embodied energy for solar thermal troughs see:
Embedded Energy Reflec-Tec
For PV systems
Energy Payback Time of Grid Connected PV Systems: Comparison Between Tracking and Fixed Systems
O. Perpi˜nan, E. Lorenzo, M. A. Castro, and R. Eyras
Prog. Photovolt: Res. Appl. 2009; 17:137–147
Be serious. All the “perpetual motion” gurus don’t appear to know what perpetual motion is. For those castigating superconducting power, has anyone considered insulation?