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I'm amazed by the NIMBYism for the middle of the desert. Yes it's not completely devoid of life and impact, but as far as places for generating solar power go,

• uoaei 4y ago
  Well, duh. I don't think anyone thinks "sun strong -> good for solar" is bad reasoning. What is bad reasoning is ending your analysis there. What's the cost-benefit of installing heavy transmissions infrastructure for the desert? The shore? The sea and ocean? Everyone and everything who live there? How vulnerable is that infrastructure to natural and artificial disasters, and what costs do we bear to build resilience to those outcomes? Aren't surrounding communities also in need of strong consistent power? Why not move the power less distance (far less materials, less power losses) and serve a different population? The classic thought-terminating cliche of if we covered X% of the Sahara we could power the whole globe obviously ignores the act of moving that energy from one place to another, which is a huge endeavor, to say the least. Your argument is basically of the flavor "why is California still in a drought while the Mississippi river rages?"
  • desro 4y ago
    Maybe we ought to think about water pipelines running from east to west...
    • wahern 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recycling_and_Northern_Development_Canal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recycling_and_Northern_D...
  • matthewdgreen 4y ago
    I presume the existence of this project demonstrates that the cost/benefit analysis was done and the result balanced towards “benefit”. The most recent nuclear power plant built in England produces 3200MW and costs nearly $40bn so far. This cable will carry 10,500MW and costs $22bn. The latter number doesn’t includes the solar generation, but build costs for utility-scale PV are running less than $1/watt so 10,500MW of name-plate capacity would cost only another $11bn. Even at much lower capacity factors you’re still looking at less than half the cost per MW than nuclear.
    • uoaei 4y ago
      Whose analysis, incorporating whose costs and whose benefits? Why are you assuming that the logic is reasonable and not asking these questions? What kinds of benefits would we see in the near future if we invested in providing power to places that could use it for development and not merely consumption?
      • brailsafe 4y ago
        Who's we? This sounds like another one of those silly "why do x when we could imagine doing something completely different" type of arguments for nothing and posited for no reason. "Don't build skyscrapers, build townhouses!" "Don't have checkstops, people die in car accidents anyway, instead we need to think about road safety" "Why build a huge energy project when small towns won't directly benefit in the next 5 years" You would assume that the considerations have been made because it's basically a massive engineering project, it hasn't been posted to hacker news for the purpose of gathering theoretical conjecture in step 1 of the planning process, and that's how massive engineering projects tend to work, along with other political effects that aren't necessarily logical reasoning experiments to begin with.
      • matthewdgreen 4y ago
        Financially I assume the analysis was done by the people committing $22bn. Presumably the investment in the region will both spur local development (jobs and infrastructure) as well as other forms of development. The thing about solar is that people tend to overbuild it, since you need to ensure that there’s sufficient capacity even when it’s cloudy or the sun is low in the sky, so power near the generation sources should be relatively inexpensive when the sun is shining (and if more is needed, scaling existing solar plants will be much cheaper than building new infrastructure.) And then of course there’s the very real benefit that decarbonizing Europe will have on the undeveloped world, which is going to bear the brunt of the effects of climate change.
      • msandford 4y ago
        It strikes me that developing a more renewable grid that decarbonizes energy in both Europe and Africa is one option. There's no reason the electricity can only go from Africa to the UK. It might well flow in reverse on windy nights. The other is that rich and middle class people in the developed world build their own little microgrids that can easily withstand primary grid outages with all the economic inefficiency that entails. Batteries are relatively scarce still and are far more equitably deployed to the grid writ large than only certain households. But of course perfect is the enemy of good which is why people are arguing about this online.
  • epanchin 4y ago
    If the surrounding communities are in need of power, they’re likely to get it cheaper as a result of the UK building there. Hopefully they require a split of the power as part of the building conditions. If the desert supplied energy to the whole continent, it would free up other resources (eg gas) to power other countries. It’s a little different to your river analogy.
• boosting6889 4y ago
  What about arrays of floating solar panels and windmills on the ocean?
  • steelbrain 4y ago
    I am uneducated in this particular field but my understanding is that salt water is extremely corrosive. Having reliable energy is not just about installation, but also about maintenance and continued operation. The latter is a challenge in a corrosive salt water environment.
    • jimmydorry 4y ago
      In comparison to keeping the panels clean and cooled in the middle of a desert?
      • dymk 4y ago
        Serious answer? Yes. Brooms and mounting panels a foot off the ground works fine. Heat reduces efficiently but by a very, very small amount. Not long ago there was a company posted to HN which puts panels basically flat on the ground, and has a little robot run up and down sweeping them off in Texas. Much simpler and cheaper and less error prone than a floating array of panels exposed to salt water and waves.
        • jnsaff2 4y ago
          Heat reduces power of PV Panels by up to 10%. Looking at a random spec sheet it's -0.35%/C so from 45C to 75C the difference is roughly 10%. I would not call it "very very small". Also increase in temperature reduces the lifetime of the panels. That said I too think that taking that hit will never be offset by all the faff of dealing with ocean water, waves etc. Moreover the big installations in Morocco have not been PV but concentrated mirrors in which case any increase in heat is improvement and brooms are more important.
        • jimmydorry 4y ago
          Brooms cause abrasions, especially when they are moving sand along glass or composite plastics. Non lubricated wipers are fine (but not ideal) for dirt / dust, but not at all comparable for sand.
• gotoeleven 4y ago
  Its this kind of stuff that makes me think all the global warming hysteria must be overblown. If it were really as dire as environmentalists would have you believe, they wouldnt be fighting this kind of stuff (or nuclear). The only real accomplishment the global warming people have achieved is to make energy much more expensive and energy supplies much more unstable (e.g. california, europe) Most environmentalists surely have good intentions, but they (like most people) are not experts on climate science and those that are have conflicted interests. For academics, you can only get one answer or you are cast out and shunned as a big oil lackey. For activist groups like greenpeace etc they only raise money by being alarmist. And then some are simply motivated by the desire to hurt western economies. https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2020/12/21/chinas_green_ngo_climate_propaganda_enablers_654042.html https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2020/12/21/chinas_g...
  • caf 4y ago
    It's almost like "they" aren't some monolithic borg that agree on everything, isn't it.
  • colechristensen 4y ago
    There are very real concerns but a whole lot of people talking about them have pretty shallow knowledge and just sort of jump on anything that sounds right. This is a problem with many issues that attract activists. Lousy activists shouldn’t invalidate the issues that inspired them.
  • Dylan16807 4y ago
    This: "Most environmentalists surely have good intentions, but they (like most people) are not experts on climate science" Invalidates this: " If it were really as dire as environmentalists would have you believe, they wouldnt be fighting this kind of stuff (or nuclear)."
  • Consultant32452 4y ago
    With every political problem: environment, racism, failing schools, terrorists, climate change, etc. the people in power need the problem more than they need the solution.
• nerdponx 4y ago
  It's not NIMBYism because it's not my backyard. It's an attempt at environmentalism and cost-benefit calculations. It might turn out to be net positive, but you can't know that unless you consider the negatives first.
  • tails4e 4y ago
    That's a stretch. We're literally talking about arid almost-wasteland. A few sq miles is a small portion, yet will provide clean power. The cost benefit is abundantly clear.
    • _8j50 4y ago
      But like, it is someone else's country. They just may not like the look of it and that would be the end of the story, maybe move on to ocean based solar+current hybrid power generators?
      • lumost 4y ago
        What’s wrong with a country exporting their solar resources? An arid resource less desert can become an economic boon.
        • _8j50 4y ago
          Why are you asking me that as if I made that claim?
      • stu2b50 4y ago
        Morroco is the one pushing for it, in this case. It's not like the nation state in question is being forced into it. They see it as a major opportunity to export energy, a famously lucrative enterprise for countries.
        • _8j50 4y ago
          I didn't dispute that, i just said the value of it is not the only consideration, you still need to test it out before deciding, regardless of who pushed for it.
• akira2501 4y ago
  The costs are rooted in Africa, the benefits are exported to Europe. I feel like it's more a recognition of the colonial aspects of this project.
  • flavius29663 4y ago
    Africa gets a lot of jobs they would otherwise never get. How is exporting your labor something bad? Countries try hard to get more exports, but once an African country does so, it's bad all of the sudden.
    • gisely 4y ago
      Depends on how that labor is valued. Just because a project creates jobs with export value in country doesn’t mean that project is a net benefit for the people of that country. A project like a waste reprocessing facility might create exportable labor for the country that hosts it, while simultaneously harming the health or people who work in the facility and those who live around it. Does it generally make for a just system if rich countries are allowed place facilities they don’t want in poor ones? I think the answer depends on how well labor in those countries is rewarded for working at such facilities. So I certainly hope countries that are considering hosting those projects drive a hard bargain on price, starting by acknowledging that what they are giving up is real. The land use is a real concern, yes even in the desert.
      • flavius29663 4y ago
        This is not a waste processing plant though. Even waste processing can be lucrative, Sweden buys trash to burn from neighboring countries. How can people say with a straight face that land use in the Sahara is a concern is beyond me. I guess global warming really is over-hyped, if we got to worry about land use in Sahara.
      • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        > The land use is a real concern, yes even in the desert. Could you probide some examples of these concerns?
• Forestessential 4y ago
  they would be better off finding a use for the power in Africa. It like they have to pipe it in from so far just to... have it worthwhile. smh terribly thought.
  • Dylan16807 4y ago
    No they wouldn't. If local users want power then install more panels in addition to the UK panels.
    • SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
      It’s actually probably the opposite because of that - people in Africa now might have this as an accessible option simply because the UK went through all of the trouble to stand up the infrastructure. Even if the resources from the project itself don’t get reused all of the knowledge and derisking gained from demonstrating the concept has some intangible value
  • pasttense01 4y ago
    See this map: https://www.altestore.com/diy-solar-resources/solar-insolation-map-world/ https://www.altestore.com/diy-solar-resources/solar-insolati... Most of the rest of Africa has as good or better solar potential than these two countries.