One 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.
Sorry, I didn't mean to say they were a rich country, but had the means to advance rapidly compared to other third world countries.
Algeria had 186B$ of cash and was debt free. It even lent 5B$ to the IMF[1].
that 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.
That's the de facto situation, whereas I was referring to the de jure one. Ouarzazate is nowhere near Western Sahara, but I was just clarifying the parent comment.
I don't see where that conflicts with the previous claim. In particular, it's telling that the Manhasset negotiations didn't involve a Spanish delegation.
it 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.
I 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.
I 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."
> 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?"
IIRC, 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.
Blowers 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.
Normally 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.
Depends 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).
I 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...
Well 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.
surely 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.
"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:
Is that 200 tons of ore, or 200 tons of processed uranium?
Rhetorical question. Neither.
A 1 GW reactor needs 200 tons (Mg) of unenriched U3O8 (237.5 kmol). That is typically 0.72% U-235, and needs to be enriched to 3.5-5% (low-enriched uranium) for fission fuel, which is usually UO2.
So the 237.5 kmol of U3O8 contains 5.130 kmol of U-235, which can make 102.6 kmol of UO2 (5% U-235), with a total mass of 27.7 tons. That leaves 609.9 kmol of leftover (depleted) U-238, or 145.2 tons. That typically goes into armor-penetrating bullets and artillery slugs.
That's the downstream side. One ton of U3O8 might mean up to 999 tons of mine tailings--which are less radioactive than the natural rock, as the U-235 has been removed from them. Nevertheless, they may also contain toxic heavy metals that have never before been exposed to weathering.
So let's say up to 199800 tons of tailings that require some additional processing due to potentially toxic runoff. Coal mining also has the same problem with tailings, but coal-mining tailings are often a viscous, corrosive slurry.
200000 tons sounds like a lot of waste, until you compare it to the coal plant.
Yes, I understand that this solar plant is in a desert.
The observation is meant for solar in general. In Europe, the US, and Japan, for example, many people are pro-solar, which is good. However, it appears that nuclear is really needed if want to greatly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Coal is still used for 40% of electricity generation in the US. It's 80% in China, which uses even more electricity.
>Coal is still used for 40% of electricity generation in the US.
That's true now, but both the Democrats and the Republicans have committed to reducing that number to 0% now that the US is one of the biggest producers of natural gas.
One issue and I see others have caught on as well. Is that
Nukes (and this thing) need to be located close by a source of cooling water to dump the waste heat+. And they require mines to provide fuel. All that is a hidden foot print. Gas and coal fired plants have the same issues. There is the plant itself and then there is all the hidden infrastructure needed to support it. At least the solar thermal plants just need cooling water. The PV plants don't even need that.
+ high quality heat aka hot salt -> thermodynamic machine -> high quality shaft power + low quality waste heat.
True - 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?
Those are easy numbers to figure, and there's enough empty desert space within Morocco's own borders for all of those installations (assuming you accept their claim over Western Sahara).
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?
As someone who lives in a country (Brazil) which uses lots of hydro, I have a related question...
How much space does it take, compared to a hydro plant of equivalent power? Hydro is also relatively clean, and is also known for taking massive amounts of space.
Hydro is the most environmentally destructive source of power. It ruins more natural habitat than strip mining coal, clearcutting forests, solar PV in virgin land, or any other kind of generation. And the river bottoms and canyons it destroys are among the most biodiverse habitats in the world before their destruction.
In 2013 the plant generated a record 98.6 TWh,
supplying approximately 75% of the electricity
consumed by Paraguay and 17% of that consumed
by Brazil.
I'm sure that most of the citizens of Paraguay and Brazil will gladly accept this inexpensive hydro power, even at the loss of a few flooded canyons.
It's nice to sit in ivory towers and criticize. In the real world, many many people's lives are made much easier and more productive by harnessing this inexpensive hydro power.
You want to solve some real problems in Brazil, figure out how to stop the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. That, there, is a world scale tragedy. Not so the beautiful Itaipu Dam, which I've toured, and which helps so many Brazilians.
True, but you'd be surprised. Morocco has more than two dozen hydro stations, 460MW of pumped storage and there's still some unused capacity for future hydro projects. Hydro obviously isn't the future of electricity for Morocco, indeed there aren't enough rivers, but it's playing a substantial role today as part of the renewable energy mix, e.g. numbers from a few years ago show hydro generated twice as much electricity as all solar/wind.
Take the recent solar project, Noor I, that's launching within a month. Its production is about 370GWH per year, hydro currently does something close to 1900 GWH.
This is where the idea of highway and surface streets being solar panels becomes interesting. This isn't science-fiction either, there are a few pilot deployments already such as:
You're not going to use glass panels in your roads. You're far more likely to use printed spools of flexible cells and cover them with a translucent, pourable protective layer. Some form of epoxy, or a concrete impregnated with optical fibers, perhaps? The efficiency per unit area will be horribly low, but when multiplied by the area of the whole road, you still end up with a lot of power.
You will lose some area to potholes. That's just another reason not to use the expensive, glass-covered cells.
Looking at it charitably, you can make more money from renewable projects, if you have a bigger grid, as you can ship the excess energy on particularly sunny or windy days to neighbouring areas. So if the interconnects are non-existant or already used to full capacity, it makes the projects slightly less economically viable.
But since the spanish government recently launched a bit of a full-on attack on solar power, it's more likely to be BS, to pander to vested interests that the power will compete with.
Very inaccurate statement with some elements of truth, I'd say. (But then I'm not an expert, just an interested reader on the topic).
On the first point, Spain has not prohibited new solar projects. It has removed (even retroactively) most incentives to renewable energy production. This is in part because of the speculative bubble in solar investment caused by the previously existing incentives (production goals were overshot by a huge margin), but also, as others have pointed out, to pander to corporate interests (this is very clear in the way self-consumption is being penalized under new legislation)
As for interconnections with France, they have recently doubled their capacity from 1% to 2%. So the EU's 10% interconnection goal for all countries is still very far away for the France-Spain connection. I'm not sure about the reasons for this. There is on the one hand the very high cost of building connections across the Pyrenees (even higher now that they have to be underground due to environmental concerns); a traditional reluctance by France is also often cited, but OTOH I think France is much better connected to other neighboring countries, so I'm not sure what to make of this.
It's the "because" in the sentence that is completely wrong. It's Spain official policy to increase the interconnection capacity with France, due to the huge energy production overcapacity (over 200%) of the country. But it is mostly combined cycle and gas plants that concentrate most of the excess capacity and are way underused. See e.g. http://on.ft.com/1rt0XNG for more info. It's the use of all the gas infrastructure (including regasification plants, etc.) that Spain wants to "push" into Europe's market. The situation in Ucraine may well help with this, because of Europe's dependency on Russia.
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...
Remember that politics in wealthy countries is all about doing approximately what people want you to do. The payoff is that you get some leeway on issues people don't care about (which is where members of congress earn their money). It's the same with the EU. The EU is not magical; everything agreed on is a compromise between member states, many of which have radically different priorities.
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?
This 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
> In short the EU should be doing better within it's own borders
I agree. It's not terribly surprising that some countries are nitpicking though: the solar industry is young, small and relatively poor. The nuclear industry is established, big and relatively rich. These industries are direct competitors in a heavily regulated environment, the sort of market where entrenched players are at natural advantage.
There is the issue of cascading failures also here : several of my friends working for majors European power grid suppliers still have nightmares from the 2006 power outage.
A vessel ship cut a power line in Germany, which triggered a domino-like power outage throughout all Europe (up to Portugal IIRC) making 15 millions of home go dark for several hours.
Solar (and worse, Wind) power is not constant : it adds a source of unstability in the mix.
Since the risk is there you need backup capacity anyway, and even if thermal production is very stable, usage over the day is not. So you need balancing no matter what. You do need to improve balancing to integrate lots of wind/solar - however with land-wind being so cheap, there is money to spend on balancing.
Land is cheap, sure, but the transmission capacity to take it from generation to consumption sure isn't.
Europe had electrical grids that were perfectly capable of distributing the "ancient, horrible" thermal generation quite acceptably. Now there's a lot of renewables installed the grid is starting to look like the bottleneck. Who pays for the grid upgrades so that it's not the bottleneck? The renewable people say the grid people should, and the grid people say that the renewable people should.
If there was so, so much money in the renewables market then why are they balking at paying for installing more long haul transmission lines? Probably because they're very expensive; if they were just 1% of the cost of the renewable facility nobody would really care. But they're probably on par with or perhaps even more expensive than the total plant installation. Which takes these projects from profitable versus thermal to non-profitable versus thermal I'd suspect. Hence the bickering.
So thermal balancing is a well understood art that's going on 100 years old now. Renewable balancing is not as well understood and is perhaps only 5-10 years old at any kind of scale. That's why grid batteries are such a big deal, because balancing is hard and batteries tend to have little/no latency so they can react faster than natural gas peaker plants.
I'm not saying that moving to renewables is a bad idea and that we should just stick with coal or anything; renewables are obviously the future. But there are definite, real problems associated with their roll-out that aren't easily or cheaply solved. I think one thing that will make a huge difference is exposing the time-variable pricing of electricity to everyone. It'll create a huge market for demand smoothing and consumer grade (and scale!) load smoothing devices like inverter A/C units, peak shaving batteries (1kWh battery with a 3kW inverter/charger), people putting 500-1000W of solar on their own roofs, etc.
> Solar (and worse, Wind) power is not constant : it adds a source of unstability in the mix.
They are not baseline power, but they provide diversity of sources into the mix, and would serve to defray any single source failure from causing a domino effect.
They've set a target but not allocated any money, in the middle of an economic crisis and strong opposition to budget deficit spending. That means it's probably not going to happen.
The 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.
One nuclear core has a power of 700-1500MW (1GW per core in average in US). A nuclear plant may contain several cores. I don't see why I'm getting downvoted, I'm providing figures for comparison.
While 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.
The reason that solar power projects have been executed without any major controversy (otherwise all so visible in India in relation to any big project) has mainly been possible because India has a huge chunk of arid/non-arable land in the West and center of India. All of the major solar project so far and all of the planned one's have come up in these areas.
India has also been experimenting [1] with putting solar panels over the (extensive system of) canals in the state of Gujarat. The panels provide the added benefit of reducing the rate of evaporation from the open canals.
India 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
So.... 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?
The 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.
Anywhere 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.
Not all deserts are equal. The Sahara desert is truly immense -- 99.99% of it is not at risk of construction. And unless you are building on top of something with a natural water source, you're probably not endangering any life; the parts without water sources are essentially lifeless.
Frankly, after the initial setup, the shelter the panels provide will probably support more life than the open sand. Same as why environmentalists are ok sinking ships to provide a foundation for artificial reefs -- nature does not magically optimize for the most life-dense environment; it just is the way it is.
If there is one environment on the planet not in risk it's the Sahara. A lot of Egypt, Northern Africa, Iraq/Palestine would have looked like the American Midwest back when they were empires.
True its a man-made desert (despite some published nonsense about 'shifts in the earth's axis' causing weather changes). So are most of the ecosystems on the planet, by now. The issue is, changing relatively stable ecosystems is done at our peril. I just want to point out how little we really care about this stuff - to the point we enthusiastically endorse mega projects that amount to terraforming, with so little discussion.
It is, however, important to make sure that this plant is not in any migratory paths of birds. The air above the centre of the plant will be hot enough to incinerate them (this has happened with these sorts of solar plants)
You are thinking about a different type of system I suspect. If anything the air would be cooler above a system of this sort as the heat is being carried away by pipes.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188328-californias-new-so... <--- Don't think too much about the numbers they report; reports have come out conflicting with original reports. The point is that CSP does kill off flocks of birds... The question is how many.
Ah, yes. After re-reading the article I can see that I misunderstood what kind of system they were building - I saw the arrays of mirrors and thought they were building one of these:
Again, the attitude here is that species unique to the desert environment are worthless; that more familiar species that humans like have value; that somehow its better for every life form to have more shade and water and less sunlight. This is untrue for the desert environment. And hard for many people to comprehend.
"More life" has never been the ecological impact metric. Why, a cattle feedlot has more life than the prairie that came before. And so on.
The desert is by no means lifeless. Some 50 species of mammals, endless snakes and arachnids (scorpions etc), many species of grass and brush. Even in the relatively-less-inhabited sand dune 'oceans' there is life.
But nobody is putting solar panels in the sand dunes. It will have to be on solid ground - rocky plateaus. Which are the most-populated of the Sahara environments.
You have to make relative impact judgement eventually. Pure relativism will just paralyze you.
No reasonable person is going to think that replacing 1km^2 of the central Sahara is equivalent to bulldozing 1km^2 of the Amazon. "More life" might be simplistic, so call it more life*biodiversity for total impact or whatever you want.
And in this specific example, the fact is that you are impacting almost no desert species in the dry parts of the Sahara. I suspect you are conflating low-moisture "deserts" like the Sonoran desert, where there is in fact life to impact:
Nobody is building anything on sand dunes. That's a straw man, right? Its the rocky places that have life, and are also useful for construction projects.
The Sahara has been there for centuries now. Its not a local disturbed weather pattern by now. So as an ecological issue, its significant. It should be considered when proposing megaprojects that alter square miles of ground. Yet it hardly gets mentioned. I take this as evidence we are not serious about ecological impact issues.
Sure, it's ~5-15,000 years old. The snowball started a feedback loop when people cut down local forests and over grazing killed off a lot of grass land. Altering local wind patterns etc. But, that's still an eye blink in terms of ecology.
I think you're forgetting how absolutely, insanely large the Sahara desert is. We're talking about a solar plant that will be the size of a single city. Frankly, I think statements like "exterminate many species" are absurdly hyperbolic. Will it kill some animals? Yes. Species? I doubt it.
Species are notoriously local. The choice will be, which species to exterminate. Probably will be done without thought, because the site will be chosen purely economically.
No they are not. Species are dependent upon habitats for which they are adapted to. If a particular species is extremely local, it is strictly because the suitable habitat for their physical characteristics is extremely localized.
This isn't the Galapagos islands. This is the Sahara desert. To suggest that there is some habitat feature in one extremely small section of it that isn't present in others is just plain ridiculous. The main driver of extinction and endangerment in the Sahara has been over hunting by humans. Not habitat loss.
I'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.)
Care to put some magnitude numbers on that "thermal pollution" effect? How does it compare to, say, the emission of warm water from conventional power plants into the marine environment? Or urban heat islands? How is the albedo of the plant versus that of the existing terrain?
I'm also confused about the idea of a desert "becoming" uninhabitable. The whole discussion reminds me of people talking about bird death effects only related to wind power, ignoring all other environmental and man-made causes. I do accept that the desert is an ecosystem of its own and the usual checks should be made that you're not eradicating the sole habitat of an endangered species.
Edit: there's even an environmental impact check in that EISA PDF from my other comment.
The Ouarzazate solar complex study area is not part of any protected natural zone; however, the following are located on its outlying zones:
The Mansour Ed Dahbi artificial lake, part of RAMSAR (site of the dam – located 6 km South of the site);
The Bouljir dorcas gazelle reserve (13 km to the North-West of the site);
The Iguernane Reserve (15 km to the North–West of the site);
The key site of Sbaa Chaab (20 km East of the site);
The Biosphere Reserve (solar complex in buffer zone B of the Biosphere Reserve).
None of the plant species found in the project site and its environs is considered rare or endangered.
The solar complex project site is considered to be of low heritage value.
The areas with high heritage value are located on the eastern and western reaches of the project site.
The emission of warm water from (conventional and nuclear) power plants is a significant issue but it's kind of not the most prominent issue w.r.t. nuclear power so it tends to be ignored (e.g. the fact that the water is slightly more radioactive or contaminated gets a lot more attention -- it's well known that heat-loving ecosystems develop around power plant outflows).
The magnitude of the thermal pollution varies by technology. Morroco is planning a heat-concentrating system (boiling water with a giant parabolic mirror, in essence) which produces very intense heat in the middle and actually cools the land in the surrounding errors (since the mirrors will have a much higher albedo than rocks and sand). I'm not actually sure if this is going to be a net increase in heat absorption, so this might be a non-issue. (This form of solar generation is apparently more expensive than photovoltaics, though.)
The Union of Concerned Scientists is much more worried about water use, especially in arid areas, with such power plants.
Photovoltaics (solar cells) are pretty much black and about 20-30% efficient) so they're absorbing more incident radiation than rocks and sand and then converting 70-80% of it to heat. We see similar effects from urbanization of desert areas (e.g. Phoenix and Las Vegas) so it's not like the effects will be unprecedented -- they just shouldn't be ignored.
That's exactly the misconception folks have about desert right there, in that quoted "becoming". The idea is that deserts are worthless, containing no life. Probably because they contain nothing that humans value for their own comfort.
Yet deserts have lots of life, unique life, that because of the harsh environment is exquisitely tuned to the desert environment. This is the stuff that will be lost if the sunlight is gone, the heat goes away, the moisture balance is upset by so much shade. Plentiful shade and cool and wet are good for people; disaster for the desert ecosystem.
The 'thermal pollution' is, curiously, cooling instead of heating in this case. Light is turned to electricity instead of falling on the ground and becoming heat.
The ground absorbs most of the solar radiation anyway. So having some of that radiation hit some black pipes is not going to change the amount of heat generated in any significant way. So you need to explain what you mean by "thermal pollution".
The albedo (reflectivity) of typical desert landscape is going to be higher than that of solar collectors (which, by definition, are trying to collect sunlight). Large cities, which are not specifically trying to collect sunlight, already have climatic effects (because they absorb more heat).
I'm not down on solar, just pointing out it has its own potential downsides which shouldn't be ignored.
Solar 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.
Why 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.
The 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.
Do 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.
Is 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 ) which abandoned quickly. IMO Decentralization is the answer not MEGAProjects.
This is no concept. CSP technology is quite real. Spain has the largest number of CSP plants in the world, with over 2GW installed to date. This would only be a quarter of that capacity, but the largest single plant.
From 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."
How 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.
The 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.
I 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?
You 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?
Can 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 ...
To 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.
I think that the average person cannot really picture 500,000 houses; big numbers are hard.
Percentages are easier. This plant delivers 500 megawatt of power, which is 15% of the biggest nuclear powerplant of the US (or 7% of the biggest hydroelectric power plant of the US, or 2% of the world's biggest power plant, the Three Gorges Dam in China).
This helps putting in perspective the size of the plant in terms of what other endeavours of that kind offer and helps cope with the fact that the average person has no idea how many plants there are in the world and so how to relate the 500,000 houses number to the importance a given project might have.
The average person can absolutely picture 500,000 homes. If I live in a city of 2 million then it's one quarter of the size. I can visualise this quite easily.
And if you think the average person is going to find percentages of some arbitrary landmark then I don't think you understand the average person.
There are 2.7 people in the average US household. If homes are equivalent to households (I don’t know how they are defined – I think they might be identical) then this power plant can power two thirds of your city (presumably minus all the infrastructure needed to run all the rest of the city, everything from offices to shopping malls to street lights – I don’t even know what the relation of residential use to all other use is nor would I be super keen on guessing), not just a quarter.
Still, I do agree that it’s easier to visualize with the number of households attached, inaccuracies be damned (at least if you do both).
PS: Interesting tidbit I just found out while doing some quick googling on this: Apparently the average US household consumes more electricity per month (more than 900 kWh) than I do in a whole year (roughly 800 kWh).
I think what he/she meant was 2 million households. You make a good point though, I can absolutely imagine laymen confusing "household" with "citizen".
I think so too, but still where on earth do I find household counts for a city? Population counts are on wikipedia, and I know rough numbers for a bunch of cities—but I have no clue when it comes to households. How many households are in your city? (and you're not allowed to calculate from population)
My point is that you shouldn't do math to get a first impression whether something is important or marginal. The is a significant amount of people for which math and numbers sound like jibberish and don't perform the elementary proportions you just did. There is even some disagreement about the numbers on this microthread.
You have a fair point about the arbitrary landmark though; mine was just a lame attempt at making an example.
The key point readers might want to quickly get at a first glance: is this a significant project or a drop in the ocean?
Well, if you choose those specific percentages, people might think it's a small accomplishment, 15%, 7% and 2% seem kind of small.
I don't think there is one good way of representing numbers, it's a complex matter because it's not about the number itself, it's about our perception.
The 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.
I'm pretty sure that would confuse people even more; i have no idea how much electricity a soccer field uses on a monthly basis.
Can't we just get over it and accept that the only thing people generally have a good idea about is the power consumption of their own household, and as such using home energy consumption is what journalists have settled on? It's really the most pragmatic, and is only problematic when they're not providing the GW value.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Households don't consume identical amounts of power. When an article discusses powering large numbers like this, it's using an average. If you don't know how much power your own house uses then you don't know how you compare to the average.
As for knowing or not knowing the exact number, do people not read their electric bills?
Agree that the power required for a home is variable and so it is a more complex measure but I think that something that can "power 1 million homes" means more to the average person in a measurable way than "XYZ GW".
It's true "power 1 million homes" fuzzy unit, but it's actually what lay people and policy makers want to know in the end. Also true what it takes to power homes varies a lot.
I remember kayaking down the Colorado river. First day was hot and the Hoover dam upstream was running it's generators full tilt to power all the air conditioners in Vegas. River was kinda scary. Next day weather moved in and the temperature dropped 20 degrees. Air conditioners off, generators off. Now flow and the river was still with wind blowing upstream and we had to paddle all the way out for 8 miles.
To those replying that people don't know what GWs are - it's pretty sad, really. One would hope that in the XXI century, especially in a technological civilization of the west, every self-respecting human would know what a watt is. As it is now, even journalists don't expect anything from their audience anymore.
If you look at the economics of journalism, it's understandable why they write this way (the economics view explains most of the ways modern journalism is crap), but it's disheartening that nobody minds writing about "calories" (which should be kcal), or "horsepower", but watts need a "X homes" explanation.
I know what a Watt is and I understand the Giga-prefix. I still like an analogy with my GW numbers, because in my daily life I don't encounter these things very often and have a hard time imagining how much that exactly is. I would have to Google some other representative values, like the output of a typical coal plant to get an idea what the number means.
This is not the case with calories (I know that what I eat daily has about 2500 of those) or horsepower (I know that my car used to have 60).
As far as calories go Capital-C Calorie is another way to write kcal. Confusing? Yes, but the terminology is correct.
Anyway, if we are talking about any large quantity of anything we are given a reference point. People have trouble with large quantities they don't encounter in their everyday lives. Not because they are dumb but because they don't have a reference point. Say 100,000 pounds of food. How much is that? I don't know, "enough to feed 100 people for a year." I can understand that. (I made those numbers up)
Yeah, I don't mind the reference points. There are pretty useful. But I dislike when a source gives only the reference point, but not the value itself. Not the case here, but it's a common practice.
I know what a watt is, and I understand what giga means. I know what a calorie means because I eat food and I have to make decisions about how many calories to consume daily. I know what horsepower means because when I shop for cars, I compare them to one another. I don't know what gigawatt means because I don't shop for power, I don't compare power output of one reactor to another, and I don't worry about power consumption because it's all covered by my wall outlets.
I don't know why you're getting uppity about this specific unit, but your post reeks of elitism and arrogance. You happen to understand what a watt is, so it's disheartening and sad that nobody else does (it's so lonely being so smart and being surrounded by dumb people)? Keep your shitty judgmental attitude to yourself.
> I don't know what gigawatt means because I don't shop for power, I don't compare power output of one reactor to another, and I don't worry about power consumption because it's all covered by my wall outlets.
Okay. 1000 watts are roughly one 1.3 HP, everybody knows what a horse power is. So a megawatt is 1300 hp and gigawatt is 1 300 000 hp. We use cars all day - we have idea how much a horse power is.
I have (had, until your post) no idea how much one HP is because I don't own a car and generally never liked cars (always was more into jetplanes), so I keep forgetting. But when I read something that gives HP values, I look up how much it is in watts; that's just one C-t "1 horse power in watts" <Return> away.
I know I'm shouting at the wind here, but I get the impression that most people today think education ends on high school, and after they graduate it they're not to be expected to ever go and look something up.
