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> Imagine if many more countries and Government were committed to solar energy and would make the solar industry boom because of it. We're still very early in t
by kijin 14y ago
> Imagine if many more countries and Government were committed to solar energy and would make the solar industry boom because of it. We're still very early in this, and the potential is enormous.
Here's one possibility: Sunny countries will begin to make a lot of money generating solar power and selling it to cloudy countries. North Africa, for example, could easily support all of Europe's electricity needs if we find some way to keep sand off the solar panels. But all of that money goes into the pockets of African and Middle Eastern autocrats, and the world enters a new era where everyone tries to grab the sunniest parts of the world ... umm ... wait a second, those are the same areas where we're currently killing people for oil. tl;dr: History repeats itself.
But on the flip side, solar energy would allow humanity to make good use of some of the most barren parcels of real estate in the world. Instead of using fertile fields to produce biofuel, we could use those fields to produce actual food and leave power generation to places like Arizona.
- gliese1337 14y agoIf we find some way to keep sand off the solar panels, and some way to efficiently transport it across the Mediterranean. That's certainly not impossible, but the technology for things like long-distance seafloor superconducting cables is even less mature than solar power plants. It'd be way cool to see all of that come together In The Future, but in the near-term, surplus solar power in Africa is not going to help Europe, unless they use it indirectly by using solar electricity to synthesize oil or something.
- kijin 14y ago> long-distance seafloor superconducting cables The strait of Gibraltar is only 14km across. So maybe not all of Europe, but Spain could easily connect with African grids even with conventional equipment.
- jsilence 14y agoHigh Voltage DC cables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
- reitzensteinm 14y agoHang on a second, storage is the limiting factor here. If we had cheap, dense, efficient storage, the rest would work itself out.
- blubbar 14y agoAnd the other way round: If the grid was large enough we would not need storage. It seems reasonable to try to improve both the grid and storage.
- jnw2 14y agoOn the other hand, Tesla is busy getting luxury car buyers to help subsidize the capital investment in building storage on a bigger scale, and nobody has figured out how to get luxury car buyers to subsidize grid improvements. In the long term, since the grid is a monopoly that is not eager to drop its price, whereas solar and batteries are likely to keep dropping in price, in part due to competition and in part due to appealing to early adopters, I expect that a few decades from now, the typical homeowner will use mostly solar and batteries instead of paying the monopolies' higher prices.
- gliese1337 14y agoI find that a reasonable expectation, but it will not make any difference in the ability of European homeowners to benefit form Africa's surplus of sunlight. Storage only helps when you have a sufficiently high average power in one spot, and just need to spread out the peaks and valleys in production. Fantastic storage does not help if you can't gather enough energy to store in the first place. That may not turn out to be a problem for the average European homeowner if photovoltaics get good enough, but it is the problem that kijin was addressing by suggesting sunny countries sell power to cloudy countries. One might use excellent storage technology to, e.g., charge batteries in the Sahara and ship them to Switzerland (or, more realistically, synthesize oil in the Sahara and ship it Switzerland), but that's just a slightly more indirect way of addressing the problem of transportation- moving the energy from the place where it can be produced to the place where it is needed to be used.
- robocat 14y agohttp://www.transmission-line.net/2010/10/longest-submarine-power-cable.html http://www.transmission-line.net/2010/10/longest-submarine-p... 700MW, 580km long: world's longest submarine power cable... Between HVDC stations at Eemshaven in the Netherlands and Feda in Denmark. http://www.engineerlive.com/Energy-Solutions/Transmition_Distribution/Underwater_HVDC_power_cable_sets_standard_for_transmission_projects/21325/ http://www.engineerlive.com/Energy-Solutions/Transmition_Dis...
- stfu 14y agoThere are already plans for making Africa the power generator of Europe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec