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Morocco poised to become a solar superpower with launch of desert mega-project
- JDDunn9 11y agoReminds me of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Deserts kick up so much dust, I wonder how often they have to clean the mirrors.
- nnethercote 11y ago> Deserts kick up so much dust, I wonder how often they have to clean the mirrors. Good job for phrasing that as a neutral question, rather than something negative and assuming like "This couldn't possibly work, don't they know that deserts are dusty?"
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWhatever trick they do have or will figure out, it could be pretty useful for long-duration Mars missions.
- zubspace 11y agoThis could be a perfect scenario where drones make sense. But I don't know about mars... http://www.aerialpower.com/ http://www.aerialpower.com/
- reustle 11y agoDrones to clean the stationary solar panel glass? Are you joking? Install something like a windshield wiper and be done with it.
- ceejayoz 11y agoIIRC, wipers were evaluated and decided against for Mars rover solar panels because of the risk of scratches to the glass. I'd imagine the same applies here.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoBlowers then? Drones, especially flying ones, seem to be a colossal waste of energy here. That is, on Earth; on Mars it'll be hard to make such drone, because the air is much, much less dense. AFAIR NASA only figured out how to fly a long-distance recon plane there.
- aldel 11y agoLooks like a problem that can be "slightly" easier to fix here on earth, doesn't it? :-) On a related note, dust cleaning is one of the most difficult technical challenges for the high speed train currently being built to Mecca.
- artmageddon 11y agoNormally I'd agree, but with drones, no one needs to physically go out to the site(and having spent a lot of time in the Sahara it gets freakin' hot) to clean the glass, and you don't need to worry about having to maintain the mechanical parts needed for cleaning the glass on each panel. Plus, if there's some other problem, a drone will let you visually see it.
- ceejayoz 11y agoA hair dryer and a $10 cell phone camera attached to each panel is likely more cost effective than a fleet of drones.
- pyre 11y agoDepends on how often a person needs to go out and service those parts. With a drone fleet, they can be serviced from a central location. If one dies in the field, then they can replace it with a backup while someone goes out to retrieve the downed drone. Cost-wise I have no idea which side this works in favour of, but the idea that "a hair dryer and a $10 cellphone camera" is cheap so therefore better ignores things like maintenance costs. Having a person constantly going out into the field to service these parts will definitely cost more than the parts themselves (and is not a cost you can ignore).
- AtlasLion 11y agoHere is a video from 2010 (World Bank) that shows the cleaning process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZA6TMg04Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZA6TMg04Y
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI think you're seriously overestimating the reliability of drones and at the same time underestimating the reliability of hair dryers. Also, ignoring for a moment that no commonly known type of drones would work in the martian atmosphere, stationary solutions have much more leeway for building it to NASA standards - better coils, more solder at joints, etc. I'm willing to bet that a simple blower hooked up to the energy storage and a timer mechanism could work without intervention for a hundred years or more - if made in the way they did it 40-80 years ago, as opposed to today, where all consumer devices are as crap as producers can get away with, on purpose. Contrast with (hypothetical) service drones, when every gram of additional reliability is cutting into the flight time. As for what kind of drones could work on Mars... well, leafblowers on service rails or on wheels are the only things I can come up with that make sense. Magnetic field flying is probably too energy-intensive, and quadcopters won't work in martian atmosphere. EDIT: I think the Sahara and Mars threads got mixed up...
- Shivetya 11y agosurely there are some surface treatments that they can use to minimize the need. I would be just as worried about the abrasiveness of wind driven sand.
- raverbashing 11y agoWind abrasion probably makes the mirrors more shiny
- threeseed 11y agoGiven that they are trying to stimulate local economies around the plants I would imagine they see this as a feature.
- Gravityloss 11y agoYeah, have some people gently brush them after dust events.
- AtlasLion 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZA6TMg04Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZA6TMg04Y
- Pxtl 11y agoExactly. Send a guy out with a big janitor's push-broom in the evening.
- Keyframe 11y agoMaybe ultrasonic vibration could be used? I don't know if it can handle large particles/amount of dust or how it would affect wildlife.
- AtlasLion 11y agothey use rotating brushes car wash style. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZA6TMg04Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZA6TMg04Y
- dzhiurgis 11y agoWell the panels are tracking the sun, so it would make sense to build in a wiper that utilises same mechanical motion. Possibly even use condensation - in the precise time of night at dew point, rotate the panel to a morning position.
- Luc 11y agoI don't know about cleaning but the desert sand seems to have little effect on the mirrors: "Regarding the irreversible degradation on relative specular reflectivity of exposed mirrors on natural aging site, relative low loss of about 0.4%, on average, was recorded after more than 360 days of exposure. This low degradation can be related to the low wind speed on the region." Surface wear damage of glass solar mirrors in Moroccan desert environment: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/266078057_Surface_wear_damage_of_glass_solar_mirrors_in_Moroccan_desert_environment http://www.researchgate.net/publication/266078057_Surface_we...
- venomsnake 11y agoCan we please ban from humanity any journalist that writes "will be able to power X homes" ... Just give GW, it would be enough If you want to put to scale use something else (will provide the output of 1/2 hoover dams, will be able to supply 0.1% of US electricity or power 5000000 tumble dryers or 3 ATI cards) Homes just don't need electricity to exist ...
- 3stripe 11y agoThe fact that I have no idea what GW means might give you a clue why journalists do this.
- stingraycharles 11y agoTo be fair, they provided both metrics. I think when you say "500 megawatt" to the average person, they have no idea how much that exactly is. When you say "500,000 houses", they do, even if it might be somewhat inaccurate.
- JorgeGT 11y agoThe problem is that home energy consumption varies wildly across the world, even orders of magnitude. I would use "power to light X soccer fields" or something like that which is more or less global.
- Bouncingsoul1 11y agoIs it a concept or is it an actual project(are the still talking or actually building). Because I've heard ideas like this before( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec ) which abandoned quickly. IMO Decentralization is the answer not MEGAProjects.
- chillax 11y agoFrom the article: "When the full complex is complete, it will be the largest concentrated solar power (CSP) plant in the world , and the first phase, called Noor 1, will go live next month." "When they are finished, the four plants at Ouarzazate will occupy a space as big as Morocco’s capital city, Rabat, and generate 580MW of electricity, enough to power a million homes. Noor 1 itself has a generating capacity of 160MW."
- aerique 11y agoHow many homes are there in Morocco's capital city? I'm curious whether (with current technology) we need more or less space than one home in solar panels to power one home.
- icebraining 11y agoWikipedia provides the answer: about 150k. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabat#Subdivisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabat#Subdivisions
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoThe number is likely much higher than that, Moroccans all know the official demographic numbers (for big cities) are vastly understated because they're not based on a census like in say the US, but rather based on a registry of every single person like in most of Europe, only there are millions of internal migrants who don't register when they move to the city, and there's significant semi-homelessness and shanty towns which aren't reflected in the official numbers. For Casablanca it's usually a really really big difference, with official numbers at 3 million and some, and locals approximating it topping 6 million. The official numbers in Rabat aren't as inaccurate but 150k households at least feels much lower than my personal experiences.
- oska 11y agoLinks to more information: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_solar_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_solar_power_station [2] http://www.worldbank.org/projects/P131256?lang=en http://www.worldbank.org/projects/P131256?lang=en [3] http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projectID=270 http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projec... [4] http://gulfbusiness.com/2015/01/saudis-acwa-power-wins-1-7bn-euro-morocco-solar-power-deal/#.VLJ4byvF_8Z http://gulfbusiness.com/2015/01/saudis-acwa-power-wins-1-7bn... [5] http://www.acwapower.com/project/14/acwa-power-ouarzazate.html http://www.acwapower.com/project/14/acwa-power-ouarzazate.ht...
- adaml_623 11y agoAnother link that has ended up at the bottom of the thread due to it's parent being downvoted ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10450344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10450344 ) http://www.cspworld.org/cspworldmap http://www.cspworld.org/cspworldmap
- skbohra123 11y agoThe article talks about total capacity of plants being 580MW. If that would make Morocco a solar superpower, I am sure India and many other countries already have solar capacity more than that.
- negamax 11y agoIndia is at 4GW as of today. This is probably good enough for lots of industrial needs but India's energy requirements are increasing rapidly with urbanisation
- sslnx 11y agoWhile India has to sacrifice arable land that can be used in a lot of different ways to build a solar plant, Morocco has only gains from such projects.
- jerven 11y agoIndia also has some desert area. e.g. thar desert on the border with Pakistan. This could be used to power e.g. New Delhi
- skbohra123 11y agoIndia also have a large desert area in the state of Rajasthan and most of the the solar projects have been installed in that area only.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoAnywhere else but the desert, and the ecological impact would stop such projects. Its ironic, since the desert is a more fragile environment that most others. This project would likely exterminate many species and sterilize all the land under the mirrors. If anything thrived there, it would be completely unlike what is there now, causing an incalculable rippling ecological impact elsewhere. But desert projects get a pass on all this for some reason. I guess because, people don't like to live there. Same reason fuzzy mammals get protected status, while lizards and worms get nothing - human preference.
- Tloewald 11y agoI'm glad you raise this point. I think if we are going to stick huge solar farms in the desert we need to either (a) minimize the surface area (since it will become uninhabitable) and also figure out how to minimize the impact of thermal pollution on surrounding areas or (b) figure out how not to sterilize the area. Since I doubt anyone right now is in the mood for (b), I think we should be arguing strongly for (a). Thermal pollution on this scale is also going to cause local (or non-local) climate change, and we're going to need to deal with this at some point. There are no free lunches. The best way to get an extra kW is to save it by improving efficiency or not wasting it in the first place. (Just as it's almost certainly cheaper to prevent the Earth from getting fucked up, complete with deflecting asteroids, than it is to colonize Mars.) (Funnily enough, when I was designing a science fiction setting in the 1980s -- and of course like anyone paying attention I was already worried about global warming -- I posited that we'd be worrying about thermal pollution in the future. I thought we'd be using fusion power incredibly wastefully (flying cars, etc.) but life is always more complicated, and instead we're going to have thermal pollution from solar.)
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoSolar is doomed by that logic then. Because its effectiveness is exactly related to its physical and thermal footprint. We are already working on making the most of every square meter (conversion efficiency, concentrating the sunlight, using the most consistently-lit sites) so no help there. So if energy must be generated, a) is a lost cause. If this project is economically successful the next step is more desert consumed, and so on forever until its all gone.
- r721 11y agoI wonder at which point solar energy gathering will significantly influence local climate. As I understand right now we are far from that, but what about future trends?
- adaml_623 11y agoYou should read about the urban solar effects. Cities are warmer than the surrounding areas. Are you more worried about that than CO2 in the atmosphere?
- wayanon 11y ago"Spain has itself prohibited new solar projects because of a lack of interconnectors to transmit the energy to France" - I'd like to know more about this.
- adaml_623 11y agoThat's a really crazy thing to read. Also "The EU has set a target of ensuring that 10% of each member country’s power can be transported abroad by cable by 2020." Is that all? The governments of this world all seem to suffer from such blinkered short term visions. They can spend billions on a sporting event but a robust Europe wide electricity grid sourcing power from a sunny south...
- PietdeVries 11y agoI think it's not that straight forward... Photo-voltaic cells produce electricity, but not at a constant rate. At night zero, in the morning a bit, at noon a lot, etc. So unless you want to keep a regular power generator as backup, you need to hook yourself to a larger grid. If France doesn't want cables from Spain, I can imagine Spain won't put a lot of effort in new projects. Now the hard part about solar energy powering the world is not the technical part. It's politics. Morocco is relatively stable, but most countries around the equator are not (unfortunately). And I can imagine that if the western economies (where the money is) would need to fund the projects in the southern countries (where the sun is), they'd want some guarantees. You remember the political mayhem of a few years back that jumped from country to country, tumbling over dictators, upsetting tourism and to this date killing people in Syria?
- adaml_623 11y agoThis article is about CSP which can provide power during the night. So your point about PV is valid but hopefully will be less relevant in the future. And really when I said south I was hoping that they could just put more solar systems in Spain for feeding power up to the UK. The African connection is good but as you say politically a problem. In short the EU should be doing better within it's own borders
- the_rosentotter 11y agoSounds like a typical IMF scheme.
- jjoe 11y agoWhy the downvotes? I think it's a very lucid observation! This is just one "loan" out of many that the IMF has granted to third world countries like Morocco. IMF knows it won't get its loan plus interest back for many decades to come. It's the carrot and stick it needs to inject its own political agenda.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago> Why the downvotes? Because it's not an IMF loan?
- jjoe 11y agoThe IMF tied Morocco's $6.2bln precautionary loan line (coming directly from the IMF) to its energy dependence. This solar project is being hurried up so the loan can be unlocked. All of this is in a timetable from 2012.
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoDo you have any sources? As far as I know, this project is funded by the Germans, French, African Development Bank, EU and World Bank, without any funding from the IMF necessary, nor is there an IMF loan to be unlocked by this project. The loan you describe is separate, as you say, a precautionary loan as a safeguard for oil price increases, indeed granted in 2012. Of course the opposite has happened, the price of oil dropped very sharply and so it makes no sense for the IMF loan to have been put into use on these grounds. Which is why it hasn't been, the $6.2b line of credit with the IMF expired in August 2014, without having been used at all. In July of that year, a new similar (this time, $5b) loan was negotiated, again precautionary as an insurance policy, and that, too, hasn't been used yet and that too isn't tied to any solar project. So I still don't see where you get the fact they're either 1) building this project with IMF money or 2) unlocking an IMF loan with this project, the facts suggest the IMF loan is unrelated, precautionary, not-used and the one you refer to specifically even expired already, how it could be unlocked after it expired is beyond me but you seem adamant. There's no IMF scheme here. Does the IMF have a relationship with Morocco? Absolutely, but it's not part of this project as far as I know, not indirectly either.
- melling 11y ago"When they are finished, the four plants at Ouarzazate will occupy a space as big as Morocco’s capital city, Rabat, and generate 580MW of electricity, enough to power a million homes" The other top HN story is about a 1180 megawatt nuclear plant, which outputs about twice the power in a fraction of the space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10450171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10450171
- illumen 11y agoThis is in the desert. The nuke is on what was once useful land.
- PietdeVries 11y agoTrue - but if it takes the size of the capital of Morocco to replace half a nuclear power plant, imagine the size of the installations needed to truely power the world with solar energy?
- maxerickson 11y agoIs it too much space? Rooftop solar generally uses ~0 new space, and there is quite some reason to believe that prices will continue to drop so that people in sunny regions will install it simply to save money. It probably isn't the solution to industrial power demand, the local mill here uses more power than the rest of the county, but so what?
- halflings 11y agoRabat is ridiculously small compared to the Moroccan desert. I don't think space is a problem there.
- biehl 11y agoSomeone already has: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Fullneed.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Fullneed...
- awjr 11y agoSo is the issue here of delivering a European Supergrid (Ultra High DC) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid ? This would enable the development of a continental "green" energy grid.
- Dinoso 11y agoOne key motivator for Morocco to seek alternatives to Oil, is it's neighbor and arch enemy Algeria. Think of it like USA vs Russia and their race to be the Nr 1. All the advancement in telecommunication, Space, Robotics..etc are partly due to this race. Algeria actively supports separatists in the Sahara (Polisario front) for independence. Algeria was a very rich country until the recent demise of Oil price. Morocco has to compete with a neighbor with a very big budget and a military that is buying more and more sophisticated equipment and arsenal. Alternatives had to be found. So for energy, independence is a must have for Morocco, dictated by a geo-political environment that is not stable and very volatile.
- nextos 11y agoTechnically Sahara is still independent and Spain the official colonial administrator. It's a very tricky situation.
- AtlasLion 11y agothat is the biggest pile of steaming BS I have ever heard. Morocco is in control of all of the Sahara west of the buffer area. People in the Sahara have moroccan ID cards, vote for Moroccan elections (they just voted for locals where they participated more than other parts of Morocco). Edit: another factor is this is near Ouarzazate, no where near the (Moroccan) Western Sahara.
- pjc50 11y agoI don't think the situation in WS is quite that simple: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14115273 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14115273
- AtlasLion 11y agoit is, I am talking about the actual situation not PLANS. Morocco DOES control everything west of the buffer zones and the population in there DOES have Moroccan national ID cards and they DO vote. Edit: from the article "Western Sahara fell under Spanish rule in 1884". Because history started in 1884. Western Sahara was for Many centuries part of Morocco, it was not a country by modern standards, but local tribes did recognise reign of the Moroccan kings. there was never a "western Sahara kingdom" Mohammed Abdelaziz, the long time leader (talk about democracy) of the Polisario camps in Algeria, was born in Marrakech, Morocco, and studied at Mohammed V University in Rabat.
- Asbostos 11y agoI wonder if the cooling it surely provides to the ground under the reflectors would make the land retain more water and be hospitable enough for plants to eventually start growing there.
- geon 11y agoIt should also provide some protection from wind, so the soil is not blown away.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- vegabook 11y agoSo.... if solar can power the world, as seems increasingly within the realm of not-being-crazy, does that mean that since we're using energy that is already under the ozone layer, that we'll also solve global warming? This is just harvesting energy that's already here, in real time, right? It's not releasing energy that was created over millions of years in one concentrated burst as per carbon-based energy? Or is much of this energy usually bounced back into space, yet with solar we'll be keeping it on terra firms?
- kaybe 11y agoThe energy is converted to electric energy, but when you use it it gets eventually turned back into thermal energy. In the extreme case you make it worse since the solar radiation that would have been bounced back by the 'white' desert is now absorbed by the 'black' solar panels, which convert some of it to heat and some of it to electricity which in the end also gets turned into heat.
- snambi 11y agoVery nice story. Wish it becomes very successful.