Information Is Beautiful

Slavery? I’m sure if various countries’ troops can survive desert conditions then we most certainly can look after the construction crews needed to build these systems. Slavery has nothing to do with it. To my mind it those countries who are precisely benefiting from the current oil-based energy system in pace have a vested interest in looking towards the next step. Sand will most certainly be an issue but again, let the technologists think up the answers – even if it takes more man/machine power to have some some sort of shifting system that allows the panels to move with the sands rather than battle with them, the cost-saving from having to ship billions of tonnes of oil/coal/gas to the generation source will go in no small way towards offsetting that cost I’m sure.

As we in the West begin to run out of oil then we will need to turn to other options of energy, and a measure of this will need to be imported from systems such as this. In the UK, due to a lack of suitable sites on our own home turf and public defiance in the form of nimbysm we struggle to make use of our own natural energy resources, making these projects all the more needed.

I have to disagree with the former opinions. Just recently it was announced that a couple of corporations have joined to build the largest solar power plant yet in the Sahara desert. You can read about it e.g. at http://www.greenbang.com/plans-for-massive-desert-solar-power-project-set-in-motion_10727.html (en) or at http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article3933262/Deutsche-planen-groesstes-Solarkraftwerk-aller-Zeiten.html (de).

The only purpose of this graphic – and I think it does it well – is that the area required is not unrealistically large, and that the world’s deserts could easily “hide” them. Powering the world with solar power thus is not a utopian but a feasible idea for the future.

Great map, but you should explain that the map is not conserving areas, so it can be a bit confusing (the map’s projection is not the best to show surfaces required.)

Whenever large-scale solar is discussed you have this outpouring of angst for hypothetical victims and concerns over dust. I have lived and worked in deserts and they are much healthier places to live than the tropics. Australia has the hottest deserts in the world, and I have done hard manual work in temperatures over 40C. And for the clever chap predicting fatalities, there are already millions of people living in these regions, for whom these temperatures are not difficult, let alone fatal. What kills them is poverty.

Oh, and for the record, you clean the panels/reflectors/heliostats at night. You don’t need water to remove dust from suitably manufactured glass, a soft cloth works fine.

I have spoken to workers who have cleaned panels at the Barstow, California Solar One plant, I think the main complaint was that it was a bit boring. But no more so than cleaning offices.
The wages they were paid would go rather a long way in sub Saharan Africa, one of the worlds most desperately poor regions. Better yet if the people who live there already were given jobs, there are no acclimatization issues, and less need for young people to move to overcrowded and terribly poor urban slums.

If you want to talk about slavery, look at the practice of agriculture in the torrid zones. Look at where your coffee and cocoa come from. Look at the land area required to feed the world, and compare it to the land area needed to power it. Yes, this isn’t an accurate projection, Its an order-of-magnitude demonstration of how little is needed.

Its also not about silicon, for the ill informed fellow making that comment. Concentrating solar thermal uses nothing more exotic than steel, glass and concrete, with water as a working fluid to drive turbines. And before some bright spark for the CEC starts that “embodied energy ” nonsense, the energy payback period on these plants is generally in the months, not years, and represent a massive amplification of energy resources.

To Brett,

The ‘science’ bit of the references of those who made the above picture seem very much to focus on photovoltaic technology, hence my reflexion on silicon availability. If we were talking about thermal solar power then yes, it would indeed remove many of the manufacturing hurdles associated with the creation of no less than half a million square kilometers of solar panels. That said, it does not address the issue of political instability or the economic cost of such grand works.

The arab oil embargo of 1973 was caused when Arab states refused the export of oil to supporters of Israel during the Yom Kippur war. In other words, a political, unrelated issue caused a serious energy crisis across the world. According to the plans as they are, we would leave much of the electricity generation capacity of the european continent in these very hands. It would be very easy to gain political leverage by threatening to turn off the switch, just like Russia does currently with its natural gas policy. The point I am trying to make is that by localising power generation into too few hands, whatever they may be, is inherently dangerous.

It is a complicated scenario and a very intricately balanced eco-system. Converting from the old industrial revolution system to the new clean energy system is going to take some heavy lifting and political will – hopefully we are seeing that beginning to happen now.

Hmm.. I wonder how these squares compare to the total area, by region, of skyscraper rooftops? You know, those rooftops that are rarely seen, even more rarely used, perfectly flat, reasonably accessible to maintenance people and builders, presumably in good proximity to major backbones of the electric grid…

Also, just wanted to say I’m not very informed about the mechanics of solar energy collection, so my post was more a comparison of energies spent than of a real world solution.

A thought:

If you create a huge solar farm, you create a bunch of shade, which means any water you might leave laying around in that shade won’t evaporate as quickly.

That means you could possibly grow stuff in the shade of a solar farm and slowly reclaim desert areas (and gum up the solar panels)

Has anybody heard of such a strategy being studied?

Great map, but we can’t apply that directly.

Europe’s power in Africa is inconceivable.
Anyway we can’t use only solar power, simply because we still need power during the night.

The efficiency of solar power is still disappointing. The cost is falling but it seems there is nothing done for efficiency, I my be wrong. I think it is an issue overlooked.

China and Russia put the blame on some screwed up experiments of US for the earthquake that happened in Haiti.
Chinese and Russian Military scientists, these reports say, are concurring with Canadian researcher, and former Asia-Pacific Bureau Chief of Forbes Magazine, Benjamin Fulford, who in a very disturbing video released from his Japanese offices to the American public, details how the United States attacked China by the firing of a 90 Million Volt Shockwave from the Americans High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facilities in Alaska
If we can recollect a previous news when US blamed Russia for the earthquake in Georgio. What do you guys think? Is it really possible to create an earthquake by humans?
I came across this article about Haiti Earthquake in some blog it seems very interesting, but conspiracy theories have always been there.

http://www.konarka.com/

http://www.magenn.com/

Combine These Two Concepts!

Will someone please site where the U.N. released this figure?

Don’t forget we would have to convert all of our other technologies to be zero omissions not just power generation (though this is a very large chunk of emissions and provided we can make electric or H-cell cars we could run both in tandem)

I usually like it when I see you on Hardball, the Ed Show, Countdown, etc. However, I take issue with your comment tonight, 6/18, on the Ed Show. Referring to solar water heater Democrats using Joe Barton’s comments against Republicans in the fall elections as “fair.” While I agree substantively and specifically with you that his comments should be used against Republicans in the fall, I disagree with the notion of it being a “fair” attack.

I feel like the electricity diminishing over distance isn’t taken into account here. Maybe it is though. It just seems that if you send energy to Maine that’s coming all the way from the southwestern desert, there won’t be much left by the time it arrives.
That’s not even counting the poor people in Greenland lol

Nope. The figures don’t add up. The above graphic is misleading nonsense. Cut out the speculation. Take the data for a real-life operating solar thermal power station, say Nevada Solar One. Scale it up to global demand. Annual global energy consumption is about a million times the amount of power produced by Nevada Solar One in a year. Therefore you need a million times the area of that power station, i.e. a million times 1.6 square kilometres. Now draw a box on google earth 1.6 million square kilometres in area. Then factor in a demand doubling period of around 35 years and draw the area required in 2045, i.e. 3.2 million square kilometres. Get the picture?