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Have you ever been there? Solar panels would be extremely useless because of the sand building up everywhere. I mean, literally, people never open up their win
by csunbird 6y ago
Have you ever been there? Solar panels would be extremely useless because of the sand building up everywhere.
I mean, literally, people never open up their windows, because of the extreme amounts of sand in the air.
- Robotbeat 6y agoFar from accurate. The price of solar power in the Middle East is record low, on the order of 1 cent per kilowatt-hour.
- csunbird 6y agoMy experience visiting there disagrees. They have a large amount of land, but they also have sandstorms, along with sand being everywhere. In the long run, the maintenance should outweigh the benefits, unless they find a way to deal with this issue.
- phaemon 6y agoAnd reality disagrees with you: https://www.sunwindenergy.com/news/35-mw-solar-farm-saudi-arabia-completed https://www.sunwindenergy.com/news/35-mw-solar-farm-saudi-ar...
- Robotbeat 6y agoHere’s a more recent article. 1.35 cents per kWh. Abu Dhabi. https://cleantechnica.com/2020/05/06/abu-dhabi-will-have-the-cheapest-solar-farm-ever-built/amp/ https://cleantechnica.com/2020/05/06/abu-dhabi-will-have-the...
- raghava 6y ago> unless they find a way to deal with this issue. Cheap human labour from impoverished parts of Asia and Africa is one very possible option. The supply chains are already there. I personally know a few people from villages in South India, who had been trained in that kinda job - dressing up in heat-controlled suits, driving sand-buggies and operating large-scale-wipers and cleaners - to keep panels clean. A similar one is in India too. And some of those firms put in place a locally adapted solution - which involves a lot of wastage of resources of other kinds (water, manpower). More info: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/the-pros-and-cons-of-the-worlds-biggest-solar-park https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/the-pros-and-con... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyWUjTxyWsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyWUjTxyWsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V-8CY-5Oa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V-8CY-5Oa0
- prostoalex 6y agoTo quote The Atlantic article that was linked in another comment > The university houses an incubator for technology start-ups, including a firm founded on the premise that there’s good money to be made in keeping solar panels clean in the desert.
- rtkwe 6y agoThat's solvable though, there are setups for cleaning solar panels with robots on rails it'd be pretty easy to have a similar setup just dust off panels every few hours.
- modriano 6y ago>robots on rails That's a pretty fancy way to say motorized brushes on a timer.
- gumby 6y agoYep, but that’s how you get press and get funded. I’m not being cynical or joking.
- noja 6y agoDoes the sand stick to the panels? Could the panels be tipped?
- m4rtink 6y agoThere is most likely static electricity involved, meaning that without mechanical action the finest of dust will stick the the panel even when you turn it upside down.
- ghgraham 6y agoCleaning is certainly a key issue as can be seen in this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0553-2?draft=collection https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0553-2?draft=coll... However, there are a few complexities. Cleaning the panels continuously also causes the panels to degrade quicker. Robots for each string of panels is also a significant capital investment. Imagine an installation with hundreds of string of panels and robots for each one. In most cases panels are cleaned by human teams and not on a continual basis.
- justaman 6y agoI feel like this is a solvable problem for solar panels.
- jliptzin 6y agoYea, at the very least couldn’t you just have something like a windshield wiper periodically wiping the sand away? Or vibrate it so the sand falls off?
- Kye 6y agoIt works for DSLR sensors.
- imtringued 6y agoI just looked it up. It's pretty much a solved problem: https://youtu.be/yJ6kxipkem0?t=111 https://youtu.be/yJ6kxipkem0?t=111
- pfdietz 6y agoPV cleaning robots are off the shelf products.
- tenebrisalietum 6y agoSo tilt the solar panels a little so the sand falls off? Disclaimer: I don't know anything about solar panel farms or desert sand.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoThe one project that attempted this with lofty goals, ended up with around 1% of the energy they claimed. Dust covering panels, abrasion, wind damage. Total fail. Also, I'm surprised at the blasé way folks dismiss the total obliteration of the delicate desert ecosystem. Its like strip mining on a massive scale, to install square miles of solar panels. But everybody is on board for some reason.
- ponker 6y agoThere’s a lot of desert. If a few lizards and cacti get their habitat fucked so that humans belch less CO2 in the air affecting every species on Earth it’s a tradeoff I support.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoSee? There it is! Try to bulldoze one meadow for a development and you're killed in the press. But the desert doesn't get that respect. People seem almost proud of their disrespect for desert ecosystems.
- ponker 6y agoWell that’s just humancentrism. The meadow delivers value to me while the desert does not. And most environmental policy is about preserving the environment for humans — after all, if we stumble into population collapse the rest of the world’s species will celebrate.
- jcranmer 6y agoI mean, it's not like the Saharan Desert does anything useful, like feed nutrients (via dust storms that blow across the Atlantic) to the Amazon Rainforest that is the lungs of the world.
- me_me_me 6y agoSo all of the buildings get burred in the sand? All the time? Whole cities? /s You can put the up on raisers or roofs of buildings.
- ArkVark 6y agoAnd even if you had the solar power, what would you do with it? There is very little industry or value-add in Arabia outside of oil. It would be easier for Europe to just build solar power in the south of Spain, Italy or Greece.