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.
I used to be concerned that a college education today is equivalent to a high school diploma from 40 years ago. I was wrong. Third grade looks to be the appropriate level.
I give the the proposal a B+, for whatever third grade class this professor is teaching.
Ric Werme says:
December 3, 2010 at 3:09 pm
I’m not sure if Tellurium is named for Telluride Colorado or its the other way around.
It’s actually named after Tellus, Latin for Earth. Perhaps it is one of these rare earths we keep hearing about. 🙂
“”””” Ric Werme says:
December 3, 2010 at 3:09 pm
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. “””””
Telluride CO is named after Tellurium, which is NOT a rare earth. Cadmium is in the same group as Zinc and Mercury, and those along with Sulphur, selenium, and Tellurium form the so-called II-VI compounds, which sort of mimic the III-V compounds of Gallium Arsenide type.
Mercury, Cadmium, and Tellurium, are amongst the most obnoxious elements around, and a constantly found pollutant in water supplies. Tellurium has a nast consequence known as Tellurium breath that befalls those who work with it for any amount of time, like in the mines for example. You don’t have any idea what retching is all about if you have never gotten a whiff of something like Di-Ethyl Telluride.
Silicon solar cells would likely require both Boron and Phosphorous for dopants; but the amounts needed are 3-5 orders of magnitude below the silicon amount.
Silicon Carbide is of course a IV-IV compound like Si-Ge.
You really wouldn’t need to wash the solar panels because the constant sand storms would grind off any camel dung that ended up on the panels.
And of course those dark silicon surfaces are going to absorb the bulk of the solar spectrum, and thermalize most of it; so you can kiss goodby almost any albedo contribution; I imagine you would change the local weather/climate quite a bit.
.Hey this guy is a genus. He has to be to get funding for his “research.”
Oh, gee! Quit goofing around. Build the dam across the Straits of Gibraltar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
Thorium anyone?
http://www.power-technology.com/features/feature1141/
why bother with locating a “world power plant” in the middle of the “western” middle east and the despots that control that region of the globe?
As said earlier, PV is a not suitable, where is the Concentrated Solar Thermal mock ups? I mean if you are going to go to the trouble of building a solar power plant might as well be one that has a shot at producing a baseline of power and not just when the sun shines.
The video says they will spend $12millon (equal to 100million yen) a year on this project, barely seems adequate doesn’t it? I mean if you look at the mock up I think I see a desal plant in there, don’t those run in the BILLIONS of dollars to build? Much less maintenance thereof.
And there is the problem of the high temp superconductors, it is currently an immature technology, but, even if it were mature high-temperature superconductors are ceramics. They contain lanthanum, yttrium, or another of the rare-earth elements or bismuth or thallium; usually barium or strontium (both alkaline-earth elements); copper; and oxygen. So to make cables that are 1000s of miles long might run into a limit of how many conductors can be created.
Just the same, this project will go nowhere for the ‘world’ perhaps for Africa it might help as a gestation, but, I doubt it, better to go with an energy source that is more predictable and useful (not to mention locally generated).
Just think of Russia and its control over LNG supplies to Western Europe, never a good idea to put your energy cookies in someone else’s control.
I think from the video that the psientists ability to avoid going to paroxysmal laughter is commendable.
DaveE
Dirk H:
…producing the solar cell costs as much energy as it will deliver back in 10,000 hours of peak energy production.
Dirk, where do these figures come from? I don’t think they really pass the sniff test.
John
Re: gary turner says:
December 3, 2010 at 11:04 am
I felt something was wrong with my figures, and there was. Each 75° longitude would require a pv farm that would provide the full capacity. I had 1× capacity divided among all farms.
Never mind transmission issues, sandstorms or politics. There just aren’t enough suitable locales for producing electricity from solar around the clock.
gary
This plan sounds like more fun to me!
The laser and microwave research projects are two halves of a bold plan for a space solar power system (SSPS) under the aegis of Japan’s space agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Specifically, by 2030 the agency aims to put into geostationary orbit a solar-power generator that will transmit one gigawatt of energy to Earth, equivalent to the output of a large nuclear power plant.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=farming-solar-energy-in-space
This is a proposal which lacks a key validation tool – a used envelope, the back of which can be used to do a few rough numbers. Perhaps someone should post them one.
Re telluride, the mining city of Broken Hill in Australia (copper, lead, zinc etc) has a Telluride Street. I think the main problem there is getting rid of it.
Good to see some posters here who have actually been out in the desert – the proponents of this idea seem to have gained their knowledge from watching Lawrence of Arabia a few too many times.
1-So for 12 + hours half the worlds lights go out.
2-Who’s going to pay the little Spanish woman who has the rights to the Sun?
Re level of education- at work we regularly got graduates who came in 2 categories either- they thought they knew everything and you could not tell them anything or they knew that they still had a lot to learn and would ask questions and listen to the answers.
James.
Roy Tucker says:
Quote
Oh, gee! Quit goofing around. Build the dam across the Straits of Gibraltar:
Unquote
No need for a dam, just a series of stabilised hydrokinetic turbines set below the shipping depth. All current technology and manufacturing, can be done piecemeal and cheaply
juanslayton says:
December 3, 2010 at 9:04 pm
That’s about right, actually, when everything from inverters and grid ties and installation costs are taken into account and converted from dollars to kilowatt hours at current market price. You get about 1500 peak production hours (more or less depending on location) per year. So it takes 7 years to recover capital costs. The service life of the PV installation is 20+ years. If it isn’t a grid tie system then forget it as the cost of a battery bank to store a few days worth of electricity so the lights don’t go out during cloudy weather makes it a money-losing proposition. Grid ties are the only thing that make it practical at this point in time.
I don’t expect any great progress in electrical storage cost but I do expect the price of PV panels, inverters, and grid ties to drop significantly every year while the price electricity from the grid stays flat or rises. At some point in the near future it’s going to be stupid to not have PV installed wherever practical and as the price of the electronics drops the places where it’s economically practical will grow. It’s practical where I’m at right now and I’m feeling a bit stupid for not having done it already. I’m holding off mostly because I expect it’ll be less of a capital outlay every year I wait and in the meantime I’m investing in things that reduce how much electricity I consume without sacrificing creature comforts.
A question about a poorly remembered documentary. Is the technology of concentrating the sun’s energy to a point via curved mirrors a more efficient way of harnessing power from the sun?
David L. Hagen says:
December 3, 2010 at 3:46 pm
Hi David. How’re things going in the place whose name I cannot mention?
“But PV systems pay back this energy input within 1 to 3 years, depending on cell type and location.”
Maybe just the panels alone if purchased from a surplus source. Three years sounds about right for just the panels purchased off the shelf.
“a grid connected PV system (GCPVS) is able to produce back the energy required for its existence from 6 to 15 times during a life cycle of 30 years.”
Thirty years is a stretch for the service life. 25 years is nominal according to manufacturers and that might be inflated. By my calculation it’s 2-3 times over a conservative life of 20 years and I’m in a very good location except that power from the grid where I’m at is rather low for the U.S. @ur momisugly $0.11/kwh with no limit on quantity. Anthony reported that he pays upwards of $0.40/kwh in California for any electricity used above a rather low lifeline amount. If electricity where I’m at cost that much I’d be crazy to NOT be producing more PV electricity than I use and putting the excess back onto the grid at a profit!
The reimbursement rate for putting energy back onto the grid varies from place to place. Here I would get about $0.03/kwh and there’s no profit in that. There is however money to be saved by generating my own PV and in doing so avoid buying electricity off the grid at $0.11/kwh.
Rascal says:
December 3, 2010 at 3:43 pm
“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.”
I was wondering about that too but somehow transatlantic telephone cables deal with it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telephone_cable
Dan in California says:
December 3, 2010 at 2:16 pm
Stirling engines are the latest fad in solar thermal. I looked into it last year. All those moving parts are a bit scary. The engines themselves wear out and so do the bushings on the generator shaft. There’s also a lot of moving parts to steer the dish to track the sun. Way too many failure points if you ask me. Here in south Texas one also has to plan for straight line winds exceeding 70mph once in a while and hail the size of golf balls. I doubt those mirrors could survive for long – if you park the dish vertically to avoid the hail stones that sets it up for maximum wind loading and the hail is always accompanied by high straight line winds.
The other thing that works against this is that there isn’t any great room for future cost reductions – parabolic mirrors and generators and stirling motors and steel superstructures are not technologies that advance in cost/performance like solid-state electronic devices. So imagine you invest in one of these puppies expecting to be able to sell the electricity at a profit for the next 30 years but 10 years from now the price of PV electric has dropped by a factor of 4 making PV systems able to produce electricity for half the cost of solar thermal. You now own a dinosaur that can’t produce electricity for anywhere near the price of competing systems and have to shut it down and take a huge loss.
No thanks. I think most investors are savvy enough to realize this is a likely outcome. Of course as P.T. Barnum famously said “There’s a sucker born every minute” so I expect there’ll be a flow of investment capital into Tessara so while some Tessara founders and other employees might make some money no Tessara customers will.
@Dan in CA (continued)
Where I wrote “no Tessara customers will (profit)” on second thought that’s not fair to say. If it works as advertised it probably makes sense for getting power in places that are remote from the grid and where stringing electrical lines to that place from the nearest grid isn’t practical. Lots of places with diesel generators accessable only by helicopter need electrical power. I’m less certain it can be made competitive with the U.S. grid otherwise without subsidy. But as I said the major risk is that it becomes outdated before it pays for itself. PV is just too good for decentralization. Compare having a big parabolic mirror in your backyard with concentrated light that can blind people and an engine operating with 1000 degree working fluids vs. laying flexible PV like roll roofing over the top of shingles with no moving parts and nothing getting hotter than roof shingles. That day is coming sooner than most people think. Inverters and grid ties won’t improve through technology as much as the panels but I reckon’ the inverter and tie can be at least be quickly halved through standardization and economy of scale but after that not so much.
Dave Springer says:
December 4, 2010 at 3:12 am
“I was wondering about that too but somehow transatlantic telephone cables deal with it:”
Sea cables do break and do get mended. You hear it in the news every time a part of Africa or India loses internet connectivity. Most of the times it’s ships ankors that break a cable, not earthquakes. The exact location of the cables is usually kept secret to stall sabotage attempts; so when a ship hits one it’s simply bad luck.
DesertYote says:
December 3, 2010 at 8:47 am
Its 2010, were is my flying car. They promised me a flying car. I want my flying car!
Here’s your flying car.
http://www.terrafugia.com/
James Barker says:
December 4, 2010 at 7:45 am
The flying platform is coming! Dick Tracy had one in 1940 that was powered by magnetism. His pal, B.O. Plenty said, “he who controls magnetism controls the universe”. Patience…
As to rare earth elements, a little science can be dangerous! Writers here are off track with regard to use of RE elements in solar cells. True, scarce elements are used.
Tantalum is a transition element used in some of the latest superconducting materials. Unfortunately, it is 20 times the cost of copper. The rare earths used in supercon technology, like Yttrium and others, are unbelievably expensive, so multiply again by three orders of magnitude, once the market supply would go “critical”. These elements are rate/cost limiting, and I don’t think anyone has built a transmission cable comprising these even a hundred yards long, much less hundreds of miles long.
In the news recently, China has been cornering the market on RE and transition elements. So they would have us over a barrel anyway, were this “Sahara Speculation” to be feasible.
I think supercon transmission will continue to have a place in computing and “small-scale” technology. I can’t see it going large scale. If this were feasible, T. Boone Pickens would not have abandoned his mega wind farm idea (I think that was a political position anyway, BTW), where the limiting problem appeared to have been identified as transmission of power from the remote location.
Let’s see the proof of concept for just one phase of this Speculation, say transmission of power using superconduction for a windmill, for example. Please demonstrate one step at a time before piling on paradigm after paradigm.
Give us all a break. The hysteria is giving away to terrible flights of fancy. As some one who knows something about applications of silica (feasibility studies, etc), specifications for silica for use in mfg silicon and high quality glass are not lying there on the ground. For high quality silicon we are talking 99.9+ SiO2 with ultra low alumina, and a host of other oxides. For high quality glass – in addition to similar specs to the above (they like to add other high quality oxides in carefully measured amounts) they also must remove refractory grains like zircon which abounds in desert sands – these will not melt and will leave ‘seeds’ in the glass. I guess this is part of the crescendo of craziness that comes with collapse of CAGW.
It looks so easy we just HAVE to do it…. uh, what do you mean the cells will be destroyed after a few years of sandstorms and wind erosion in the desert? Oh, that’s right it’s a HARSH CLIMATE in the desert…. sorry, nevermind!!!!!
I don’t think any of the originators of this fancy are aware that you don’t just melt sand to get silicon. It is a very energy intensive chemical reaction done in a blast furnace.
I also wonder how long solar pv cells and/or glass last when sand blasted.