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> They could cover a desert in panels and sell the cars and batteries across Europe/Asia, while providing the power as well. They would once again have the larg

> They could cover a desert in panels and sell the cars and batteries across Europe/Asia, while providing the power as well. They would once again have the largest control of the world's energy. Doesn't seem like you can reasonably charge a car in europe/asia from solar panels in the middle east. You'll be dealing with some pretty nasty transmission losses.

mschuster91 8y ago
> Doesn't seem like you can reasonably charge a car in europe/asia from solar panels in the middle east. You'll be dealing with some pretty nasty transmission losses. First of all, the oil reserves in Saudi-Arabia aren't going to last forever - but they will need massive amounts of energy to maintain their cities, especially for drinking water. Desalination is ridiculously expensive, and water access will be the war driver in the entire Middle East once climate change really hits. Cover the desert with solar plants, the coasts with desalination plants (and don't care about the brine) => control who gets the electricity and/or the water, control the region. Saudi-Arabia is actually already going pretty far in their fight for regional supremacy, that would fit perfectly. As for transmitting the energy to Europe/Asia, well... there's technology in the works to synthesize gas (both gasoline and, well, gas) using electricity, which can be fed into the existing gas pipeline infrastructure and thus sold to the wide world.
- Misdicorl 8y ago
  Wars about control of water will be centered around areas with fresh water availability. The middle east doesnt have any. If you have cheap desalinization capability, why would there be wars over water?
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Wars about control of water will be centered around areas with fresh water availability. The middle east doesnt have any. More likely, they'll be centered around points of availability in areas of relative scarcity. There is, in fact freshwater in the Middle East, just not a lot. Which makes what is there a potential source of contention.
    - Misdicorl 8y ago
      Fair point. Do climate models have the fidelity to predict desertification? My intuition would be that the entire middle east will be devoid of water at 2 degrees hotter.
      - SuoDuanDao 8y ago
        As always, the question is 'with how much certainty'? At low enough certainty I could predict what parts of the world will get dryer or wetter on the back of an envelope, but there are a lot of unknowables like human activity that would have to be included to make a quite reliable prediction.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    If you have cheap desalinization capability, why would there be wars over water? "Cheap" desalinization is like "bargain" chip fab. It's still an inherently expensive proposition.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      I agree that cheap and expensive need context. According to the first link I found about large scale desalination, it can be done for a wholesale price of around $0.58/cubic meter.[1] For comparison, my local water authority (in a part of the US that is not particularly dry) charges about $0.94/cubic meter. Without knowing exactly what the difference is between wholesale and retail rates, I feel reasonably confident that desalination technology is currently sufficient to avoid civilization collapse and/or war. [1]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/534996/megascale-desalination/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/534996/megascale-desalina...
      - stcredzero 8y ago
        I feel reasonably confident that desalination technology is currently sufficient to avoid civilization collapse and/or war. Yes. But the experience up until now, is that desalinization is so much more expensive than other water sources, to the point that such plants often get mothballed when the other sources become available again. https://www.circleofblue.org/2016/asia/water-scarce-regions-desalination-plants-risky-investments/ https://www.circleofblue.org/2016/asia/water-scarce-regions-...
      - mschuster91 8y ago
        > Without knowing exactly what the difference is between wholesale and retail rates, I feel reasonably confident that desalination technology is currently sufficient to avoid civilization collapse and/or war. The problem is you're gonna need energy to operate these plants and you can't scale stuff up infinitely as the brine will kill off marine life and eventually, the water sources will become so salty that they can not be used for desalination any more: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/sep/29/peak-salt-is-the-desalination-dream-over-for-the-gulf-states https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals... Which means, once Peak Salt hits, there will be problems. Oh, and desalinating water for drinking purposes is one thing - using it for agricultural demands is a whole different beast. Egypt, for example, already had problems in 2010, and the issue won't get smaller over the decades. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/11/09/egypt.water.shortage/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/11/09/egypt.water.s...
- markvdb 8y ago
  > First of all, the oil reserves in Saudi-Arabia aren't going to last forever - but they will need massive amounts of energy to maintain their cities, especially for drinking water. Desalination is ridiculously expensive, and water access will be the war driver in the entire Middle East once climate change really hits. Somewhat OT, but... there has been enormous progress in energy efficient desalination, to the point that Israel has become a net exporter of water. See DOI 10.1016/j.desal.2017.10.033 for more technical information on recent progress desalination.
- tiatia123 8y ago
  "Saudi-Arabia is actually already going pretty far in their fight for regional supremacy, that would fit perfectly." Doubt it. Too many cultural problems. Tribal, backward societies with people who don't like to work (companies prefer to hire foreigners. They are obligated to hire locals, locals stay often at home while getting paid). Based on the huge discrepancy of wealth, they don't seem to be very successful in the War against Yemen. https://www.meforum.org/articles/other/why-arabs-lose-wars https://www.meforum.org/articles/other/why-arabs-lose-wars
- ghshephard 8y ago
  "Desalination is ridiculously expensive" - as long as you are near the ocean, it's pretty cheap. Hyflux[1] on a 25 year DBOO contract will sell you as much water as you want for less than $0.50 per 1000 liters. Combined with even a modicum of water conservation [2], you can get per-capita water use down to around a cost of $0.05/day at a 100 liters of use a day. [1] https://www.wateronline.com/doc/pub-and-hyflux-sign-water-purchase-agreement-0001 https://www.wateronline.com/doc/pub-and-hyflux-sign-water-pu... [2] http://www.waterwise.co.za/export/sites/water-wise/downloads/water/WaterWise_How_Much_Water_Does_Your_Family_Use.pdf http://www.waterwise.co.za/export/sites/water-wise/downloads...
wongarsu 8y ago
High Voltage Direct Current transmission lines typically lose about 3% per 1000km [1]. That's quite manageable. Building a line of that length through multiple countries would take a while, but the Saudis could pull it off. They certainly have the money 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
- fpgaminer 8y ago
  Woah, didn't realize long distance transmission was that efficient. Now I'm curious how crazy of an idea it would be to build a global solar electrical network to obviate the need for batteries (the sun is almost always shining somewhere).
  - thebluehawk 8y ago
    You do have to keep in mind the further losses in converting it back to low voltage AC using very large and expensive inverters / transformers.
    - cma 8y ago
      That's a loss that doesn't scale with range though.
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    On a smaller scale, putting solar panels in the Sahara Desert and run a big cable to Europe is frequently considered. Being in a desert removes most cloud cover, it's close to Europe, and the area required is miniscule even if you want to provide the entire area of Europe that way. The only problems are that the day-night cycle still exists and storage is expensive, that it would be a massive capital investment, and that the governments of most countries in the Sahara aren't very stable.
    - toyg 8y ago
      Lybia had started doing exactly that, in 2009/2010: http://helioscsp.com/libya-unveils-project-to-supply-solar-power-to-europe/ http://helioscsp.com/libya-unveils-project-to-supply-solar-p... In 2011, France and the US forced a regime-change that resulted in civil war and de-facto partition of the country. I would expect most of that investment has been destroyed by now, and the security situation is unlikely to be stable enough to restart this sort of grand plan for at least a decade. In the meantime, Morocco (faithful French ally, an absolute monarchy with extremist-Islam undertones) started its own effort, which is now considered to be the largest solar-panel plant in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station
debt 8y ago
Could charge the batteries in the desert and ship them.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Those are very heavy, and electricity is pretty cheap. Losing proposition.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

mschuster91 8y ago

> Doesn't seem like you can reasonably charge a car in europe/asia from solar panels in the middle east. You'll be dealing with some pretty nasty transmission losses. First of all, the oil reserves in Saudi-Arabia aren't going to last forever - but they will need massive amounts of energy to maintain their cities, especially for drinking water. Desalination is ridiculously expensive, and water access will be the war driver in the entire Middle East once climate change really hits. Cover the desert with solar plants, the coasts with desalination plants (and don't care about the brine) => control who gets the electricity and/or the water, control the region. Saudi-Arabia is actually already going pretty far in their fight for regional supremacy, that would fit perfectly. As for transmitting the energy to Europe/Asia, well... there's technology in the works to synthesize gas (both gasoline and, well, gas) using electricity, which can be fed into the existing gas pipeline infrastructure and thus sold to the wide world.

Misdicorl 8y ago
Wars about control of water will be centered around areas with fresh water availability. The middle east doesnt have any. If you have cheap desalinization capability, why would there be wars over water?
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Wars about control of water will be centered around areas with fresh water availability. The middle east doesnt have any. More likely, they'll be centered around points of availability in areas of relative scarcity. There is, in fact freshwater in the Middle East, just not a lot. Which makes what is there a potential source of contention.
  - Misdicorl 8y ago
    Fair point. Do climate models have the fidelity to predict desertification? My intuition would be that the entire middle east will be devoid of water at 2 degrees hotter.
    - SuoDuanDao 8y ago
      As always, the question is 'with how much certainty'? At low enough certainty I could predict what parts of the world will get dryer or wetter on the back of an envelope, but there are a lot of unknowables like human activity that would have to be included to make a quite reliable prediction.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  If you have cheap desalinization capability, why would there be wars over water? "Cheap" desalinization is like "bargain" chip fab. It's still an inherently expensive proposition.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    I agree that cheap and expensive need context. According to the first link I found about large scale desalination, it can be done for a wholesale price of around $0.58/cubic meter.[1] For comparison, my local water authority (in a part of the US that is not particularly dry) charges about $0.94/cubic meter. Without knowing exactly what the difference is between wholesale and retail rates, I feel reasonably confident that desalination technology is currently sufficient to avoid civilization collapse and/or war. [1]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/534996/megascale-desalination/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/534996/megascale-desalina...
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      I feel reasonably confident that desalination technology is currently sufficient to avoid civilization collapse and/or war. Yes. But the experience up until now, is that desalinization is so much more expensive than other water sources, to the point that such plants often get mothballed when the other sources become available again. https://www.circleofblue.org/2016/asia/water-scarce-regions-desalination-plants-risky-investments/ https://www.circleofblue.org/2016/asia/water-scarce-regions-...
    - mschuster91 8y ago
      > Without knowing exactly what the difference is between wholesale and retail rates, I feel reasonably confident that desalination technology is currently sufficient to avoid civilization collapse and/or war. The problem is you're gonna need energy to operate these plants and you can't scale stuff up infinitely as the brine will kill off marine life and eventually, the water sources will become so salty that they can not be used for desalination any more: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/sep/29/peak-salt-is-the-desalination-dream-over-for-the-gulf-states https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals... Which means, once Peak Salt hits, there will be problems. Oh, and desalinating water for drinking purposes is one thing - using it for agricultural demands is a whole different beast. Egypt, for example, already had problems in 2010, and the issue won't get smaller over the decades. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/11/09/egypt.water.shortage/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/11/09/egypt.water.s...
markvdb 8y ago
> First of all, the oil reserves in Saudi-Arabia aren't going to last forever - but they will need massive amounts of energy to maintain their cities, especially for drinking water. Desalination is ridiculously expensive, and water access will be the war driver in the entire Middle East once climate change really hits. Somewhat OT, but... there has been enormous progress in energy efficient desalination, to the point that Israel has become a net exporter of water. See DOI 10.1016/j.desal.2017.10.033 for more technical information on recent progress desalination.
tiatia123 8y ago
"Saudi-Arabia is actually already going pretty far in their fight for regional supremacy, that would fit perfectly." Doubt it. Too many cultural problems. Tribal, backward societies with people who don't like to work (companies prefer to hire foreigners. They are obligated to hire locals, locals stay often at home while getting paid). Based on the huge discrepancy of wealth, they don't seem to be very successful in the War against Yemen. https://www.meforum.org/articles/other/why-arabs-lose-wars https://www.meforum.org/articles/other/why-arabs-lose-wars
ghshephard 8y ago
"Desalination is ridiculously expensive" - as long as you are near the ocean, it's pretty cheap. Hyflux[1] on a 25 year DBOO contract will sell you as much water as you want for less than $0.50 per 1000 liters. Combined with even a modicum of water conservation [2], you can get per-capita water use down to around a cost of $0.05/day at a 100 liters of use a day. [1] https://www.wateronline.com/doc/pub-and-hyflux-sign-water-purchase-agreement-0001 https://www.wateronline.com/doc/pub-and-hyflux-sign-water-pu... [2] http://www.waterwise.co.za/export/sites/water-wise/downloads/water/WaterWise_How_Much_Water_Does_Your_Family_Use.pdf http://www.waterwise.co.za/export/sites/water-wise/downloads...

wongarsu 8y ago

High Voltage Direct Current transmission lines typically lose about 3% per 1000km [1]. That's quite manageable. Building a line of that length through multiple countries would take a while, but the Saudis could pull it off. They certainly have the money 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

fpgaminer 8y ago
Woah, didn't realize long distance transmission was that efficient. Now I'm curious how crazy of an idea it would be to build a global solar electrical network to obviate the need for batteries (the sun is almost always shining somewhere).
- thebluehawk 8y ago
  You do have to keep in mind the further losses in converting it back to low voltage AC using very large and expensive inverters / transformers.
  - cma 8y ago
    That's a loss that doesn't scale with range though.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  On a smaller scale, putting solar panels in the Sahara Desert and run a big cable to Europe is frequently considered. Being in a desert removes most cloud cover, it's close to Europe, and the area required is miniscule even if you want to provide the entire area of Europe that way. The only problems are that the day-night cycle still exists and storage is expensive, that it would be a massive capital investment, and that the governments of most countries in the Sahara aren't very stable.
  - toyg 8y ago
    Lybia had started doing exactly that, in 2009/2010: http://helioscsp.com/libya-unveils-project-to-supply-solar-power-to-europe/ http://helioscsp.com/libya-unveils-project-to-supply-solar-p... In 2011, France and the US forced a regime-change that resulted in civil war and de-facto partition of the country. I would expect most of that investment has been destroyed by now, and the security situation is unlikely to be stable enough to restart this sort of grand plan for at least a decade. In the meantime, Morocco (faithful French ally, an absolute monarchy with extremist-Islam undertones) started its own effort, which is now considered to be the largest solar-panel plant in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station

debt 8y ago

Could charge the batteries in the desert and ship them.

stcredzero 8y ago
Those are very heavy, and electricity is pretty cheap. Losing proposition.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]