I have had some of their wine… Oh I was distracted are we supposed to be thinking about something else.
PS: I heard once that the sunlight that falls on the landmass of the world in one hour could power the world for one year.
I hate Tony Abbott.
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You had me at petrodollar fuckery.
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If they want to get their poop together, build them, and sell power, GREAT! But since the question infers that “we” would be building the things, it’s pretty obvious that you don’t go embarking on a project like this without considering whether or not the area has the stability for a investment of this magnitude.
That sounds like the storyline for the next game from Amanita Design!
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Well, we could cover Arizona and New Mexico with the things instead, but I think we’d have the same kinds of problems with the natives. At least it’s not Florida.
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thx… this was very confusing 
On the transmission issue; I’ve heard of a compelling plan to use higher-efficiency cobalt-based catalyzers in water electrolysis plants connected to large solar arrays, …let’s say “in the middle of nowhere” but with a water source to draw from. This would basically create & store liquid hydrogen all day rather than direct-feed electricity, and thus resolve the transmission problem. Efficient? Meh. But one has to balance that against inevitable loss in transmission lines, the general fact that people want to use power in one place but have it generated somewhere else, and that the challenges can be met with a zero carbon footprint. Anyone else heard of this? I hope it wasn’t debunked. (and whatever happened to Ytrrium? I thought copper power lines were going to all get replaced with Ytrrium and the world would rejoice in song.)
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The Strait of Gibraltar is a perfect place to distribute energy from Northern Africa and, in fact, Algeria is already a major energy distribution hub!
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The problem is there are inherent differences between piping fuel and carrying electricity across wires - namely efficiency loss due to electrical resistance.
You can transport fuel any distance without losing the energy within the fuel itself (at the cost of losing energy powering the transportation mechanism itself), but you can’t send electricity across wires without at least some loss. The more energy you try to move, and the further the distance across which you move it, the bigger the inefficiencies.
This can be mitigated to some extent by using better conducting materials for the wires and transforming the electricity into higher voltages for transmission, but it becomes a major problem when you’re trying to send power from Morocco to, say, China.
Europe might benefit without too much loss, but the further away you send the power from the point of production, the worse your efficiency gets until it simply stops being worthwhile. And this is just one of the inherent problems of centralized power systems.
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I don’t have the energy to test that first statement but I’ll gladly sign up to the second with bells on.
By their nature, photovoltaic cells can be installed anywhere at all. You could spread that spot between 20 African countries and get the same amount of power. In practice they should be spread across different longitudes anyway.
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If someone could figure out a way to boil water with Abbott-loathing, Oz could be carbon-neutral tomorrow.
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Your math still doesn’t add up. The 1100 W/m² is the instantaneous energy delivered to the Earth’s surface at any given time assuming the sun is at its apex.
At an annual average of 5 hours per day of full sunlight (assuming 1100 W/m² instantaneous energy) that’s a total of 5500 Watts per day. You are correct in the 35% efficiency due to spectral absorption, and with the other inefficiencies you are down to that 15% or so you stated. Which is about 165 W/m² or over 5 hours, 825W per day.
Just doing a quick google search for solar panels I found this one:
http://www.wholesalesolar.com/products.folder/module-folder/Astronergy/CHSM6612P-305.html
It’s rated at a maximum power output of 305 Watts, and a panel size of 77x40 inches or a little less than 2 square meters. So that panel has a maximum power output of about 150 W/m². Obviously those are in ideal conditions, but even under mediocre settings I think it would achieve better than 60 Watts per panel
My home solar panels went online yesterday! The engineer grinned and showed me the meter running backwards.
A few years ago I moved into my mother’s old home, an energy sucking monster I decided to tackle by the horns. Changing all the lightbulbs to LEDs, switching to an Energy Star refrigerator and never turning on AC wasn’t enough to get into the “minimal consumption” bill rate. However, I’ve been saving towards this goal and this year I could afford to take the solar plunge. According to the utility rates, my new self-sustainability and impending bracket change, the investment could break even in three years, four at most.
Maybe in a year or two I’ll install a few more panels to go all the way down to minus zero.
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Why cover the earth at all? Let’s just get a geostationary solar array ring 'round the earth. If (using some of the figures above) the amount of solar panels it would take to provide an equitable power supply for everyone on earth is a million sq. kilometers, by my napkin numbers we would only need a ring about 100m in width (and that’s not even taking in to account increased efficiency of solar panels above the atmosphere). Bring some tethers down to transfer the juice to local transmission stations, and there you have it, problem solved.
You’re welcome, humanity.
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That graphic is an interesting choice, illustrating as it does the much talked about, little acted on Trans Sahara gas pipeline. It’s a good demonstration of the problems of grand infrastructure projects in the region, all three countries on the pipeline have varying problems with insurgencies - from Boko Haram and MEND in Nigeria to AQIM and Belmokhtar in Algeria.
The major problem, though, is that there should be more focus on plans to provide power to Africans, rather than just exporting it. Nigeria’s electrification rate is woeful.
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I would be a little careful about describing parts of other people’s countries as “unused”.
Also, going on past examples, the local capacity would not be there for such construction projects so labour would be imported. One may hope that these things would change but pessimism is easier, and probably warranted.
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Because it’s a historically unstable area, and since the sun hits all over the earth, there is no reason to depend on that region for solar energy.
Of course this is just like a graphic showing how much of the world would be covered if everyone was given a 10ftx10ft area to stand in.
Of course having one centralized solar array makes no sense. You leave it open to catastrophic destruction from something like people, or even more mundane things like weird weather, earthquakes, hell even a meteor.
Of course the #1 reason not to have one massive area is because so much energy is lost from distribution methods. So much electricity now is wasted from running the lines from the power plant to your house. Solar will probably end up working best localized, each house having their own array, with perhaps larger farms picking up the slack. It will happen as we make more and more efficient cells.
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