Desertec

You gotta a problem with that? The Brazilians already have a HVDC link 2375 km long.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

It's a nonstarter for a variety of reasons:

1. North African countries are unstable, so putting your power source there is probably not a good idea. Libya is still having a civil war and ISIS-borne terrorism will remain a concern regardless who wins.
2. Cost of building a power line to the EU, when the EU has no money because it has to subsidize southern europe and migrants. Look at all the problems Italy's banks, and Deutschebank, are having at the moment.
3. Cost of maintenance, large scale solar is still relatively new (30 years) and the original plants are only just now hitting the end of their service lives.
4. Cheap oil, especially thanks to Saudi price dumping.
5. People want low power costs on their end, and in normal countries (outside of northern europe) will get pissy and vote people out if their rates increase.
6. Putting the power plant in the Gobi is a nonstarter due to the huge distance between China and the EU (also China itself is indifferent to climate change and the PRC needs to keep miners employed).
7. Putting the power plant in Mexico or Chile is a nonstarter because it's too isolated from the rest of the world.
8. Putting the power plant in the US is a nonstarter due to Democracy (specifically, local NIMBYs will kill it like they're trying to kill Yucca Mtn and how they almost killed American wind power).
9. Putting the power plant in the Ocean (say around the equator) is a nonstarter due to the greatly increased cost and increased risk of failure.

most importantly:

10. Generally speaking, it's a bad idea to only have one power source as it represents one point of failure. A distributed grid is a happy, reliable and fault-tolerant grid.

>doesnt work at night
>cant be transferred very far without large losses requiring even more panels
>terrible at high latitudes

That's just copper wire.

The best superconductor we have in 2016 needs to be -70º C, and costs billions of times more to produce than copper wire.

Getting a room temperature superconductor has been making very very slow progress over the last 30 years, and even if it is ever produced we won't be using it for power distribution if building more power plants to make up for the losses of copper wire is more cost effective.

>blaming southern europe
lol americans.....

Did anybody think of using a superconductor in a superposition, I think the combination of supers would make it far more effective with quantum power distribution

>> just copper wire
Exactly, but with superconductors we could do much better. The fact that we can transfer electricity over 2375 km is pretty amazing.

nah not really
the fact we have quantum teleportation by 1 second from now is pretty amazing

Are we entering into a global energy crisis?
Does this project exist, has it even begun?

There's your answer, Einstein.

You left out all the actual technical hurdles:

Cost of rare-earth and platinum group materials needed to produce that much solar panel would sky-rocket, if we even have enough (for most of the elements, we dont).

Power distribution isnt just inefficient, it is nearly impossible. How do you get the power to where it is needed? Its essentially impossible. The only good answer here is to use it on-site, but for what? Don't tell me you are going to fertilize the desert by desalinating seawater, its fucking sand the next thing you are going to be doing is importing a quadrillion metric fuck-tons of either top-soil or hydroponics equipment.

It is viable in the event that humanity survives to witness a major technological leap.

You would need first to have asteroid farming, to have a feasible supply of platinum group metals.

Using these, you build massive ammonia synthesis plants powered by solar energy. The ammonia is then shipped world wide in the form of fertilizers, and the energy is recycled globally as food stuffs. Really though, all you would need to do is turn Africa into a giant farm. You could feed the world twenty times over.

Room Temperature Superconductors when?

The more centralized the easier to sabotage.

>We forgot to put in consideration the daily sand storms that happens in there

And also, on the map it looks small, but in reality it's hundreds of kilometers, where to get all this money, engineers, workers.

And they would work in 50°C+

>The studies concluded that the extremely high solar radiation in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East outweighs the 10–15% transmission losses between the desert regions and Europe. This means that solar thermal power plants in the desert regions are more economical than the same kinds of plants in southern Europe. The German Aerospace Center has calculated that if solar thermal power plants were to be constructed in large numbers in the coming years, the estimated cost of electricity would come down from 0.09–0.22 euro/kWh to about 0.04–0.05 euro/kWh.[18][47]

It was a non-started because the Arab Spring started JUST as work was getting ready to start on it. EU is in a permanent state of energy crisis because it produces very little of its energy.

My understanding is that it was going to be transported to Europe with HVDC. Also, solar towers are more efficient than PV panels and don't require rare-earth materials, they're just mirrors.

Just because the image shows it in the shape of a square doesn't mean that's how it would be. It's for point of illustration. In fact it would be a lot more advantageous for the EU to split these amongst the 5 North African states, because it can make them compete with each other for price and also ensure that no-one country has an exclusive hold on the energy supply (like Russia does currently).

>where to get all this money, engineers, workers.
>And they would work in 50°C+
Pretty sure those problems have already been dealt with by the established oil industry that exists currently in North Africa (Algeria, Libya etc.). They'd probably be a big overlap in contractors and equipment, so it's not like you even need to create or train a new set of people.

Do people even realize how fucking massive those rectangles are? You'd see nothing but solar panels stretching from one horizon to the next, several times over, in every direction. This is an appeal to the human inability to assess scale.

Dude I work in the energy sector. This project was never even close to getting off the ground because it is entirely unviable for multiple reasons already given in this thread.

In fact, it is often used as an example of frivolous misconceptions in presentations to non-specialists.

It's for point of illustration dumbass, how fucking stupid are you? That's not the way they were actually proposing to build them (all in one place), or even the actual location.

>This project was never even close to getting off the ground because Russia and the Gulf States would go bankrupt.
Fix'd for you.

Nothing presented as a problem in this thread or in the "Obstacles" section on wikipedia is a serious problem.

That doesn't solve the problem. All North African and middle eastern countries have issues with stability especially in regards to ISIS. Even Egypt is having to initiate another crackdown just to contain ISIS to the Sinai (this is a huge problem because it's adjacent the Suez Canal).

A much better solution would be to distribute in all major deserts (installations in Israel, Nevada, Chile, Namiba and China) but there's still the problems outlined here

Centralization wasn't my point at all, you irritable asshat. The area is absolutely staggering, no matter how you cut it.

A better idea would be to put it in orbit where solar panels can work more efficiently, then beam the power down using microwaves. The only major issue is getting enough solar panels into orbit. In this way there's a much greater dollar-per-kwh and it's more difficult to sabotage as it's in geosynchronous orbit.

ISIS are just an extension of Qatari and Turkish foreign/energy policy. Cut their funding from Qatar and their arms smuggling/tacit tactical support from Turkey and they're gone in a year. Russia would be harder to tackle. However this thread is meant to be focusing on the actual technical obstacles as this is Veeky Forums and the wiki page only really mention the political issues as obstacles, implying that technically it was okay.

Solar panels are far less suitable to higher latitudes.

>Cut their funding from Qatar and their arms smuggling/tacit tactical support from Turkey and they're gone in a year.

Then we'd get another Al-Queda (Saudi backed group) filling the vacuum. This is just how life in the sandbox works after colonialism. Of course we could just let Israel have their fantasy and expand to the Persian Gulf (and imprison all Muslims Boer-war style) but that's not PC.

So is the area covered by multiple types of staple crop farming or grazing land or any number of other things but you never talk about the total area do you? The point is that if it's broken up into many small sites, it stops being a problem.

How efficient would the microwave transmission be?

It doesn't matter. When the singularity is upon us, they will all merge with the hive or perish.

It's not just them. Russia has an arms supply that trumps Turkey's, a black budget that equals Qatar's and an intelligence/propaganda/paramilitary network, built on more than half a century of USSR vs NATO proxy wars, that surpasses the global Islamist network. They would not take losing their no.1 client very nicely.

But like I said, this is all politics. The point is, is this project TECHNICALLY feasible?

Current tests net 85% efficiency at about a mile at ground level. It can probably be scaled up.

well yeah, but the feasibility of a project has to take into consideration both engineering and political requirements. A power plant is useless if it gets blown up.

Politically it's more or less impossible. It would simultaneously pull the bottom out of both the gas and the oil markets, collapse the economies of the Gulf States and Russia thus sending their already precarious societies into a tail-spin, whilst also crashing the dollar, due to its tie with the oil market and thus crash the U.S economy, meaning a huge chunk of the world economy would be fucked causing something like 2008 all over again or worse. This means Russia, the USA and the GCC would all be against it and these are pretty much the only countries relevant on the world geopolitical scene, together with China and the EU itself. It would probably also bankrupt many of Europe's existing energy giants and affect huge markets like the energy trading sector, big European banks with investments in fossil fuels etc. Considering that all the above problems would take place in the short-term and the fact that the guaranteed economic gains for the EU would be in the medium/long-term, it seems extremely unlikely that the (famously disunited) EU would manage to hold it together through another world recession, a crash in its main trading partners' economy and the potential conflict from at least 1 or 2 established international agitators (Russia and GCC) all at the same time and see the whole thing through.

But that's the politics of the matter.

This.

I don't think anyone is suggesting we replace oil with solar (oil is not really used for electricity generation in the EU and you can't use solar as fuel unless you have lots of electric vehicles and you don't). So the sand people and the commies would still get their money from oil.

Gas is a different matter though. And it's big too. But how would you go about terrorizing the desert power plants? Each one of them is insignificant. You'd need a batallion constantly rampaging all around the desert to have any impact. Carpet bombing could work. You could target the transmission lines but they're mostly underwater and can be dug underground too at shore. No biggie for a submarine but there's no way in hell Russia or anyone would get away with it and no terrorist organization has subs.

>Pretty sure those problems have already been dealt with by the established oil industry that exists currently in North Africa

You mean small oil and gaz pipes that requires 20 people?

Cutting gas alone from the Russian economy would still be a massive hit and AFAIK there are already 1 or 2 European countries that are in the process of shifting to an all-electric car fleet within the next few years. Pretty sure Norway is planning to ban petrol cars by 2025. So either way Russia would be fucked, unless they found a way to shift their entire focus to the Asian market. With regards to their vulnerability I’m sure that combined air attacks from Russia and traditional ground sabotage from the various groups they or the gulf nations could mobilise would be a big problem for both the EU and the North African countries (with their rather antiquated militaries) to defend.

>You mean small oil and gaz pipes that requires 20 people?
No I mean the actual oil and gas extraction plants and I don’t know what makes you think a solar-collector plant requires that many more people to run. I bet the various N. Africa based maintenance contractors could shift their focus from oil/gas to that within a couple of years.

What is much more baffling is how come the U.S. haven’t already done something like this considering that they have enormous desert expanses within their own jurisdiction?

Another issue I forgot to mention is that essentially the entirety of the Sub-Saharan or Saharan Africa's rebels-for-hire groups would be available for hire, by any party that would potentially lose money from Desertec.

leave

It's funny how Africa is the worst continent when it comes to domesticable animals and agriculture, but the best when it comes to metals and solar energy. It's like the continent of the future.

>Underwater Nuclear Reactor

This is a pretty good idea. At least on paper.

Except common sense (and the Deepwater Horizon incident) tells us that should anything happen it would be about 50x harder than fixing it overground.

solar is pretty popular in my state (AZ). But yeah would not hurt to try

>Cost of rare-earth and platinum group materials needed to produce that much solar panel
Please tell us more about the problematic platinum group materials that go into solar panels.

Basically all of our energy comes from the sun, retard. Except nuclear stuff, which contains the energy of starts which died billions of years ago

>active solar

That is an extremely limited resource. More so than even oil. Good luck finding enough minerals to make PVs to replace fossil fuel generated electric.

The best course of action is to reduce the need for electric through better usage or reduced usage. Then use passive solar (thermal).

That's what satellites are for.

Agree with you. Until we can take a Quantum Walk to transport the energy, like in leaves, it is too inefficient.

Solar cells don't require rare earth materials either. Solar towers do though (magnets).

How many times, does it have to be mentioned in this thread that Desertec did not plan to use PVs but picrelated or solar collectors?

Yes but it's not some kind of freakisly large amount.

It would be more beneficial to attempt sectioning off Africa for agricultural reasons than literally anything else.

>no earthquakes to destroy things
>Alaska
Wrong state, man. Wrong fucking state.

>put in multibillion if not multitrillion dollar power grid
>sand monkey blows up one line
>rip Europe power supply for months

Why would they put in a massive solar infrastructure in the Sahara, which requires a huge overhaul of the North African states' electrical infrastructure, when they could just power the EU with relatively cheap and safe nuclear energy within the EU itself? Most European states have relatively stable climates (outside of rain or snow) and stable ground, so the major threats to modern nuclear aren't a problem there. In fact a nuclear powered Europe has little to no major consequences using modern reactor technology.

Because whoa man solar is clean!
>meanwhile germany shutting down it's nuclear programs
Aside from special interests I have no idea why europe is going pants on head retarded

>> not some freakishly large amount
Each mirror has actuators, each actuator has rare earth elements

>EU is in a permanent state of energy crisis because it produces very little of its energy.

>tfw we've got dem coal dat shale dose oilsands so if non-fossil fuel tech doesn't develop fast enough we're sitting pretty

I guess Norway is well off but damn the EU is in for dire straits.

That post doesn't quote anyone and there are people advocating PVs in this thread. Did you not read the thread?

We still are dependant on solar. Where did the energy come from that made those trees in ancient forests that we now burn as coal?

>Where did the energy come from

The singularity.

dynafluxalternator.com/

>implement field geometry into motors and gernerators
>everything is now efficient af
>efficient enough to be self dependent once the network is big enough.

Really makes you think.

No.
bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
The result is still the same even for the Sahara desert.

The real problem there is just the cost - money and energy - of putting something into orbit. It fails on the metric, and nothing else needs to be considered until that is addressed.

Not for a long time, the research field more or less imploded in the mid 90's and hasn't recovered since.

It would be interesting to know how micro climate changes with vast areas of solar panels. Sure, the front gets really hot but at the same time there is a big shadow too.

For Sahara you could use heat for monster scale desalination.

Alternatively you could electrolyze water and sell hydrogen gas or synthetic liquid fuel. Takes a lot of energy but then again you have a lot of area for disposal.

>minerals to make PVs
The Earth's crust is absolutely loaded with silicon, what is the problem? The dopant are used in minute quantities and are not scarce either.