Solar Energy in the Sahara Desert
From my feed on Quora.com, where I’ve volunteered to answer questions about renewable energy, a reader asks: Why don’t/can’t we put solar panels in the Sahara Desert as a source of electricity?
This is a strong ideal generally, since the value of that land is low, there’s plenty of sun, and it’s very close to Europe. But, off the top of my head:
• Property rights need to be considered. I recommend against going into Libya and starting to build stuff without contemplating the social and political challenges. I chose the photo above to help you visualize what I’m talking about here. Lord only knows what it would be like trying to achieve and maintain control of land over there.
• Though there is lots of sun, it’s coupled with lots of heat, and paradoxically, that isn’t good, as the efficiency of solar PV goes down as the temperature rises.
• Transmitting the power to population centers will be expensive, as will be storing it for transmission/distribution at night.
Once the property issue is resolved, I would think that solar thermal (concentrated solar power / CSP) may be the way to go because of all the heat and the potential to store it in molten salt.
This is in fact happening in the Western part of the Sahara – with Morocco very active in developing concentrating solar power aiming at 2 GW of concentrating solar power by 2020.
Also in Mauritania, Masdar is building 15 MW of PV power near the capital.
It should also be remembered that some Sahara and related regions have huge wind power potential such as Southern Morocco, Western Sahara, and Mauritania in the West, Chad, Sudan and Somalia in the East,