The recent energy crisis has made electricity prices skyrocket. And that has prompted an accelerated installation of solar panels around the world. Thanks to the growing popularity of this renewable energy, the price of these devices has been falling in recent years. Although the persistent problem always remains the same: Where do we put all those panels?
To provide enough solar energy to power the entire world, it would take about 51 billion solar panelswhich would occupy an area with a size of about 186,000 kilometers. That’s only 3.27% of the US.. But it would be logical to think that the right place for such an installation should be somewhere with a lot of sun, which is rarely overshadowed by clouds.
A place like… a desert?
The Sahara is the largest desert. It has a gigantic size of 9.2 million square kilometers. So this mega solar farm would only occupy around 3.25%, a reasonable area of desert that, if configured well, would only force the displacement of a few humans and animals. It would not even be necessary to deforest. Besides, as pointed out by the physicist Gerhard Kniesin just six hours deserts around the world receive more solar energy (173,000 terawatts) than humans consume in a year.
But the truth is that despite having enough energy to supply our civilization to spare, there are many economic and environmental factors that make it practically impossible carry out this feat. First thing: difficulty. Second thing: the cost would be astronomical. And the third: it would destroy the ecosystems of the planet.
In fact, the desertec initiative It was one such project that planned to cover the Sahara desert with solar panels in the hope of meeting the energy needs of the Middle East and North Africa and 15% of Europe. Although well-known companies in the industry wanted to participate, the plan soon turned out to be unfeasible.
First thing: difficulty
Maintaining a solar farm in the desert is extremely difficult. Mainly because both maintenance and installation They are not the same as in the cities. The harsh environment of deserts and the dust that accumulates on solar panels affect its operation and efficiency. On the other hand, the movement of the sand and the arid and scorching winds make a very resistant installation necessary. And that would mean that the infrastructure would be more expensive. Much more expensive.
Not only that. The cost of having staff 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to offer a maintenance and constant monitoring would be another big money drain and something very difficult to carry out.
The second: the cost
The installation of a 350W solar panel costs between €200 and €400 in a home. In the desert it would be more expensive. First, you would have to build supports for the panels, transport them in the middle of nowhere and create a new electrical infrastructure on dunes and rocky terrain. According to calculations by the journalist Will Locket in this Medium article, only if we take into account the price of the panel, the delivery and the installation, that would mean some €1,000 per unit. If we multiply that figure by all the panels we need would give us a result of 514 billion23 times more than the entire US economy.
But there is more. It must be taken into account that if we want to send all that energy to any corner of the world, we would need batteries to store all that is produced during the day and feed the production at night (not all countries have the same schedules). That would mean adding about 4.2 kWh of battery storage to each panel, increasing the cost by an additional €900.
And wait, because now comes the bloodiest part: getting the energy out of the Sahara. Transportation is another worrying issue since sending energy to its destination requires huge power lines and is very expensive and involves a loss of energy up to 10%. Currently, the longest power line is only 3,200 kilometers. Bearing in mind that the longer it takes, the more energy will be lost along the way, these losses would have to be compensated by adding even more costs. Something very impractical with the technology we have today.
Third and most important: the environment
All of the above could be carried out, although hardly, in a hypothetical future. But to do so would lead us directly to our extinction. It must be taken into account that deserts are not useless at all, but above all, that any ecosystem plays a fundamental role in the global environment. In the case of turning the Sahara into a massive solar farm, only 15% of the energy absorbed by solar panels would be converted into electricity. And the rest would be returned to the atmosphere as heat, making global warming much worse.
The evidence is provided a 2018 study which used a climate model to simulate the effects on the land surface of deserts caused by the installation of these solar panels. Research suggests that when the size of the solar farm reaches 20% of the total area of the Sahara, a feedback loop is triggered. The heat produced by the darker solar panels (compared to the reflective ground) creates a great temperature difference which ends up reducing air pressure and humidifying the climate, creating rain.
Those rains would cause plants to grow in the desert and the desert to reflect less solar energy, since vegetation absorbs light better than sand and soil. With more plants, moreover, more water evaporates, creating a more humid environment which would further extend the vegetation. A green desert, sounds good doesn’t it?
The truth is that many of our ecosystems depend on the Sahara being an arid desert. He Amazon, for example, is fertilized by dust blowing in from the Sahara. Also the Atlantic is fertilized by the dust of the Sahara. Its nutrient-rich sand favors algal vegetation, which produces a large amount of oxygen on the planet.
However, the most severe effect would be an increase in the temperature of the Earth’s surface. Although it seems contradictory, water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, almost worse than CO2. That would end up warming the planet, causing ice sheet loss and changing ocean currents, ultimately causing the destruction of biodiversity around the world. In short: every ecosystem is connected and changing one of them can trigger a domino effect with devastating consequences.
Images: Unsplash
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