Big EU imports of Sahara sun-power coming soon?

This helps the UK how?

I'm kinda thinking that this wont help the UK at all, indeed it realy only helps those countries closest to the source and the UK is pretty darn far from it. Indeed if those countries that benifit from this then go oh we dont need so many power stations they in themselfs will generate less power and as such have less to export and also import less from elsewere. Bottom line this not only dosn;t help the UK but actualy will make our electricity more expensive in the long-run.

So EU subsidising this then they can pay for it in deutch marks thank you very much, no pounds going on this one. the transmission distance alone would make it unviable in every possible way to be of any use to the UK - seriously.

Now if they were to work with the Icelandic goverment and cut a deal to tap some of there lovely thermal vents for power I'm sure we in the UK could benifit more than the rest of EU as a whole and would also allow Iceland to appease the bank greedy, dont read teh small print loss makers. That would be more productive from a UK perspective. Eu going to do that, yeah right as it dont help zee germans.

ANON just incase I wish to invade europe at a later stage in my life :D.

has any one cosider the effect of such a large scale energy farming on global climate/ weather

NOT too fast there may be serious danger to such large scale energy farming on global climate/ weather

more greenwash

For a proper analysis of this hype, just read here

http://depletedcranium.com/the-realities-of-sahara-solar-power/

6.8% my extrordinarily large backside. V. Poor journalism.

As El Reg knows full well the people pushing this proposal are looking at a solar *thermal* system using trough reflectors heating glass tubes carrying some kind of oil* to drive what is basically a steam turbine power station. Given that Schott glass is one of the major contributors to the design this should not come as much of a surprise.

Modern steam generated power plants can hit 33%. In principle this could be generated at DC and sent directly down a DC line to Europe followed by a DC-AC conversion but I'll assume its a AC-DC then DC-AC link with 95% efficiency (IIRC this process has been done at 98% both ways)

So 976 (actual solar constant, not that it's particularly constant) *33%*95%*95%*0.5 (for that 1/2 the full power output)

I make that 14.8% *average* efficiency per year.. Powered by the sun for the next several million years.

Very poor research. That 6.8% is a 1st generation lab system. *ALL* PV systems only *efficiently* absorb energy around the band gap. the rest is lost as heat. Solar thermal absorbs as a *black* body, at *all* parts of the spectrum.

(I'd still like to see Gallium, which would remain liquid up to 2000c, as sadly would most reasonable containers).

6 percent?

Lewis:

Surely the combined area of all the large cities amounts to something on the order of 6% of the planet's surface? Solar power generation would I think involve less infrastructure per square meter than does a city. Paving the Sahara in solar generation systems is not so much a question of wealth required as of political will.

I say, do it.

You did read the figure, right? €400 BILLION

Not million. *BILLION*. *400 BILLION EUROS*. 400 * 10^9 EUROS. That one project would be equivalent to 2.7% of the total EU GDP.

For a power system which will provide no power to Europe in the winter at night.

The project's target is to provide 20% of EU power. And all that power needing to be backed up by the same power output of standby gas turbines for whenever the sun doesn't put his hat on.

It would provide a small proportion of the EU electricity consumptions of 342gigawatts.

"It might scale up to the gigawatt range" Yeah right. Even if it produced 10 gigawatts that's still 40,000 Euro/kW. When a nuclear power station costs around $10,000/kW worst case, and down to $1,000/kW.

Good luck with that. If you're still interested, I've got a bridge you like to buy...

CSP with heat storage

As noted by John Smith 19, the Desertec systems will most likely be CSP - using large mirror arrays. This scales well and can reuse lots of tech from conventional stream cycle power plants (coal/gas/nuclear). CSP has the added benefit that you can integrate a "heat-battery" with molten salt so you can generate power after sun-down. Look up Andasol and PS20 for more info.

@Richard Foersom

"CSP has the added benefit that you can integrate a "heat-battery" with molten salt so you can generate power after sun-down. Look up Andasol and PS20 for more info."

Quite so. IIRC the storage CSP plants have used Sodium Nitrate (Ammonium Nitrate could be used and might be cheaper but with the addition of some fuel oil would convert it into the mother of all fertilizer bombs. Not good in Algeria which has been have a few problems with fundamentalist whack jobs of late).

A landmark study for all this was done by the US Navy's ONR in the late 70's-early 80's. Their "Solchem" project was designed to make the US Navy self sufficient in oil but only using US sourced raw materials. They planed to use solar thermal heating of receivers made of clay to drive the Haber Ammonia reaction and store the energy as warm piped high pressure ammonia which could then be run over a splitter catalyst to release the heat into spray cans full of more-or-less table salt (eutectic sodium/potassium chloride mix at c500c). High temperature (but only in the heat store and receiver. Most of the high pressure piping is fairly cool) on demand for steam raising or chemical processing (Fisher-Topsch, synthesis from Methane upward?)When you're planning to build infrastructure to replace the oil needs of the US Navy, large scale economics matter a hell of a lot. They were thinking in terms of "Quads" equivalent.

Reagan got elected, proclaimed the era of cheap oil, shut down most of the DoE programmes (who were pat funding it) and the ORL went back to weapons research and SDI.

I think Australia has continued work on the concept.

You can guess what reports in my pocket.

More of the same?

Sounds like the EU is getting more specific about "administering" (i.e. non-military invasion by bureaucracy) some north African countries.

First they started with building grain mountains at more cost than using it for aid.

Then they kept pumping money into economies that needed to be reformed instead of subsidised to keep growing in their current direction, until they became fully-fledged vampires (see, I didn't call them PIIGS!)

Then they bulldozed democracy to install a self-amending treaty (that quietly allows the re-introduction of the death penalty for rioting, the Met and the CRS will love that).

Next they failed totally to bring about economic stability.

Now they're looking for somewhere else to screw over.

What else?

Cost of transmission... What is that usually, about 50% loss in transmission?

So long as you magically produce an inexpensive ambient-temperature superconductor, increase the efficiency of solar cells to 186%, cure cancer (just for good measure) and rewrite the laws of thermodynamics, 1% of the Sahara should be more than sufficient.

We hire our legislators to write laws, yes? Why have we allowed physicists to get away with it for so long?

I, for one, welcome our new desert-dwelling, superconducting, physics-defying, green-powered North-Africa-exploiting Eurocentric overlords.

UK Energy Imports

The naysayers dismiss any renewable energy initiative because it won't be able to provide 100% of the UK's energy requirements, as if we're currently self-sufficient in indigenous fossil fuel/uranium reserves. Maybe there was a time when we had enough North sea oil & gas and working coal mines but that isn't the case now. They're confusing electricity generating capacity self-sufficiency with energy self-sufficiency.

I see nothing wrong with importing a substantial part of our energy requirements in the form of electricity from CSP in the Sahara instead of importing it in the form of fossil fuels and uranium.

As for storage, if a barrage was built across the Strait of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean allowed to drop about 6 metres by evaporation (The Med would dry up in about 1000 years, about a metre per year, if it wasn't constantly replenished from the Atlantic), then the Med could be used as a massive pumped storage reservoir and Solar-Hydro generating system.

Most parts of the world have deserts which could be utilised for CSP, maybe South Africa's electricity shortages could be solved by installing CSP in the Kalahari and Namib deserts?

Re: Why transport it as electricity.

Why indeed, but perhaps the details could be improved (eg the chemistry, as already noted :)).

Take the electricity cables to the coast, perhaps to ports that already have liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities (or build some new faciltiies, if there aren't already any convenient ones - they're a lot quicker to build than (say) a set of UK nuclear power stations that isn't anywhere near being ordered yet).

At the coast, use electricity and seawater to create hydrogen, liquefy it as per existing LNG technology from North Africa, ship it to the UK (European?) ports that already have LNG import technology (or again build some if not convenient) and ship it onward to large gas consumers such as gas-powered electricity generating stations which can readily be adapted to burn H2 as well as/instead of CH4.

Obviously the overall efficiency is far from ideal, but it helps contribute to an ongoing supply of electricity in Europe (and in particular in the UK, where privatisation has left us with no energy supply strategy). And it gets around the daily "no sun at night" problem AND around the "enough storage for a week or two" issue, and most of the technology is tried tested and proven, it's just that the madness of the market combined with "the tragedy of the commons" has meant there's been no incentive to address the issue.

Incidentally, I think some of the HVDC transmission loss figures quoted above (the 25%-50% ones) are ridiculous until proven otherwise (definitive sources). Desertec themselves are claiming 10-15% but they're not exactly independent. E.g. in www.desertec.org/downloads/summary_en.pdf

So send some of it by cable at high efficiency but with no storage, and some of it as liquid hydrogen, lower efficiency but storage is inherent in the process. The energy input is "free" anyway.

Diversity. In energy supply, a reasonable amount of diversity is A Good Thing.