Morocco poised to become a solar superpower with launch of desert mega-project
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Edit: from the article "Western Sahara fell under Spanish rule in 1884". Because history started in 1884. Western Sahara was for Many centuries part of Morocco, it was not a country by modern standards, but local tribes did recognise reign of the Moroccan kings. there was never a "western Sahara kingdom"
Mohammed Abdelaziz, the long time leader (talk about democracy) of the Polisario camps in Algeria, was born in Marrakech, Morocco, and studied at Mohammed V University in Rabat.
Of course, that's only the most egregious controversy on that list, as you'd see if you scroll up a bit on that page to read the Criticism section.
Their GDP per capita is around #100 in the world. It ranks below Jamaica, Serbia, Fiji, Namibia, Angola, Iraq, etc.
Their total GDP, pre oil drop, ranked them around #50 in the world, but they're #34 in population.
Before the oil drop they were a lower middle nation in terms of wealth, nowhere near rich.
[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/algeria-contribute-5b-imf-1846...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_solar_power_station
[2] http://www.worldbank.org/projects/P131256?lang=en
[3] http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projec...
[4] http://gulfbusiness.com/2015/01/saudis-acwa-power-wins-1-7bn...
[5] http://www.acwapower.com/project/14/acwa-power-ouarzazate.ht...
Deserts kick up so much dust, I wonder how often they have to clean the mirrors.
Good job for phrasing that as a neutral question, rather than something negative and assuming like "This couldn't possibly work, don't they know that deserts are dusty?"
On a related note, dust cleaning is one of the most difficult technical challenges for the high speed train currently being built to Mecca.
Cost-wise I have no idea which side this works in favour of, but the idea that "a hair dryer and a $10 cellphone camera" is cheap so therefore better ignores things like maintenance costs. Having a person constantly going out into the field to service these parts will definitely cost more than the parts themselves (and is not a cost you can ignore).
As for what kind of drones could work on Mars... well, leafblowers on service rails or on wheels are the only things I can come up with that make sense. Magnetic field flying is probably too energy-intensive, and quadcopters won't work in martian atmosphere.
EDIT: I think the Sahara and Mars threads got mixed up...
"Regarding the irreversible degradation on relative specular reflectivity of exposed mirrors on natural aging site, relative low loss of about 0.4%, on average, was recorded after more than 360 days of exposure. This low degradation can be related to the low wind speed on the region."
Surface wear damage of glass solar mirrors in Moroccan desert environment: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/266078057_Surface_we...
The other top HN story is about a 1180 megawatt nuclear plant, which outputs about twice the power in a fraction of the space:
Rooftop solar generally uses ~0 new space, and there is quite some reason to believe that prices will continue to drop so that people in sunny regions will install it simply to save money.
It probably isn't the solution to industrial power demand, the local mill here uses more power than the rest of the county, but so what?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Fullneed...
How much space does it take, compared to a hydro plant of equivalent power? Hydro is also relatively clean, and is also known for taking massive amounts of space.
Hydro is the most environmentally destructive source of power. It ruins more natural habitat than strip mining coal, clearcutting forests, solar PV in virgin land, or any other kind of generation. And the river bottoms and canyons it destroys are among the most biodiverse habitats in the world before their destruction.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7046-hydroelectric-po...
In 2013 the plant generated a record 98.6 TWh,
supplying approximately 75% of the electricity
consumed by Paraguay and 17% of that consumed
by Brazil.
It's nice to sit in ivory towers and criticize. In the real world, many many people's lives are made much easier and more productive by harnessing this inexpensive hydro power.
You want to solve some real problems in Brazil, figure out how to stop the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. That, there, is a world scale tragedy. Not so the beautiful Itaipu Dam, which I've toured, and which helps so many Brazilians.
http://www.iea.org/stats/WebGraphs/MOROCCO2.pdf
Take the recent solar project, Noor I, that's launching within a month. Its production is about 370GWH per year, hydro currently does something close to 1900 GWH.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/05/11/3657220/solaroad...
And a road built from glass? What happens in winter with ice forming? That's not going to go well.
You will lose some area to potholes. That's just another reason not to use the expensive, glass-covered cells.
The observation is meant for solar in general. In Europe, the US, and Japan, for example, many people are pro-solar, which is good. However, it appears that nuclear is really needed if want to greatly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Coal is still used for 40% of electricity generation in the US. It's 80% in China, which uses even more electricity.
That's true now, but both the Democrats and the Republicans have committed to reducing that number to 0% now that the US is one of the biggest producers of natural gas.
+ high quality heat aka hot salt -> thermodynamic machine -> high quality shaft power + low quality waste heat.
As a comparison to coal, 3 million or more tons of coal is required per year for the equivalent amount of power.
Rhetorical question. Neither.
A 1 GW reactor needs 200 tons (Mg) of unenriched U3O8 (237.5 kmol). That is typically 0.72% U-235, and needs to be enriched to 3.5-5% (low-enriched uranium) for fission fuel, which is usually UO2.
So the 237.5 kmol of U3O8 contains 5.130 kmol of U-235, which can make 102.6 kmol of UO2 (5% U-235), with a total mass of 27.7 tons. That leaves 609.9 kmol of leftover (depleted) U-238, or 145.2 tons. That typically goes into armor-penetrating bullets and artillery slugs.
That's the downstream side. One ton of U3O8 might mean up to 999 tons of mine tailings--which are less radioactive than the natural rock, as the U-235 has been removed from them. Nevertheless, they may also contain toxic heavy metals that have never before been exposed to weathering.
So let's say up to 199800 tons of tailings that require some additional processing due to potentially toxic runoff. Coal mining also has the same problem with tailings, but coal-mining tailings are often a viscous, corrosive slurry.
200000 tons sounds like a lot of waste, until you compare it to the coal plant.
- I'd like to know more about this.
Also "The EU has set a target of ensuring that 10% of each member country’s power can be transported abroad by cable by 2020." Is that all?
The governments of this world all seem to suffer from such blinkered short term visions. They can spend billions on a sporting event but a robust Europe wide electricity grid sourcing power from a sunny south...
Photo-voltaic cells produce electricity, but not at a constant rate. At night zero, in the morning a bit, at noon a lot, etc. So unless you want to keep a regular power generator as backup, you need to hook yourself to a larger grid. If France doesn't want cables from Spain, I can imagine Spain won't put a lot of effort in new projects.
Now the hard part about solar energy powering the world is not the technical part. It's politics. Morocco is relatively stable, but most countries around the equator are not (unfortunately). And I can imagine that if the western economies (where the money is) would need to fund the projects in the southern countries (where the sun is), they'd want some guarantees. You remember the political mayhem of a few years back that jumped from country to country, tumbling over dictators, upsetting tourism and to this date killing people in Syria?
And really when I said south I was hoping that they could just put more solar systems in Spain for feeding power up to the UK. The African connection is good but as you say politically a problem.
In short the EU should be doing better within it's own borders
I agree. It's not terribly surprising that some countries are nitpicking though: the solar industry is young, small and relatively poor. The nuclear industry is established, big and relatively rich. These industries are direct competitors in a heavily regulated environment, the sort of market where entrenched players are at natural advantage.
A vessel ship cut a power line in Germany, which triggered a domino-like power outage throughout all Europe (up to Portugal IIRC) making 15 millions of home go dark for several hours.
Solar (and worse, Wind) power is not constant : it adds a source of unstability in the mix.
Because thermal plants never trip??
Europe had electrical grids that were perfectly capable of distributing the "ancient, horrible" thermal generation quite acceptably. Now there's a lot of renewables installed the grid is starting to look like the bottleneck. Who pays for the grid upgrades so that it's not the bottleneck? The renewable people say the grid people should, and the grid people say that the renewable people should.
If there was so, so much money in the renewables market then why are they balking at paying for installing more long haul transmission lines? Probably because they're very expensive; if they were just 1% of the cost of the renewable facility nobody would really care. But they're probably on par with or perhaps even more expensive than the total plant installation. Which takes these projects from profitable versus thermal to non-profitable versus thermal I'd suspect. Hence the bickering.
So thermal balancing is a well understood art that's going on 100 years old now. Renewable balancing is not as well understood and is perhaps only 5-10 years old at any kind of scale. That's why grid batteries are such a big deal, because balancing is hard and batteries tend to have little/no latency so they can react faster than natural gas peaker plants.
I'm not saying that moving to renewables is a bad idea and that we should just stick with coal or anything; renewables are obviously the future. But there are definite, real problems associated with their roll-out that aren't easily or cheaply solved. I think one thing that will make a huge difference is exposing the time-variable pricing of electricity to everyone. It'll create a huge market for demand smoothing and consumer grade (and scale!) load smoothing devices like inverter A/C units, peak shaving batteries (1kWh battery with a 3kW inverter/charger), people putting 500-1000W of solar on their own roofs, etc.
They are not baseline power, but they provide diversity of sources into the mix, and would serve to defray any single source failure from causing a domino effect.
But since the spanish government recently launched a bit of a full-on attack on solar power, it's more likely to be BS, to pander to vested interests that the power will compete with.
Nice graphs on pages 13 & 14 of this presentation: http://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/events/2015/energymanag...
> France-Spain power exchanges: balance France -> Spain of 3.6TWh
On the first point, Spain has not prohibited new solar projects. It has removed (even retroactively) most incentives to renewable energy production. This is in part because of the speculative bubble in solar investment caused by the previously existing incentives (production goals were overshot by a huge margin), but also, as others have pointed out, to pander to corporate interests (this is very clear in the way self-consumption is being penalized under new legislation)
As for interconnections with France, they have recently doubled their capacity from 1% to 2%. So the EU's 10% interconnection goal for all countries is still very far away for the France-Spain connection. I'm not sure about the reasons for this. There is on the one hand the very high cost of building connections across the Pyrenees (even higher now that they have to be underground due to environmental concerns); a traditional reluctance by France is also often cited, but OTOH I think France is much better connected to other neighboring countries, so I'm not sure what to make of this.
It's the "because" in the sentence that is completely wrong. It's Spain official policy to increase the interconnection capacity with France, due to the huge energy production overcapacity (over 200%) of the country. But it is mostly combined cycle and gas plants that concentrate most of the excess capacity and are way underused. See e.g. http://on.ft.com/1rt0XNG for more info. It's the use of all the gas infrastructure (including regasification plants, etc.) that Spain wants to "push" into Europe's market. The situation in Ucraine may well help with this, because of Europe's dependency on Russia.
The reason that solar power projects have been executed without any major controversy (otherwise all so visible in India in relation to any big project) has mainly been possible because India has a huge chunk of arid/non-arable land in the West and center of India. All of the major solar project so far and all of the planned one's have come up in these areas.
This is just harvesting energy that's already here, in real time, right? It's not releasing energy that was created over millions of years in one concentrated burst as per carbon-based energy?
Or is much of this energy usually bounced back into space, yet with solar we'll be keeping it on terra firms?
In the extreme case you make it worse since the solar radiation that would have been bounced back by the 'white' desert is now absorbed by the 'black' solar panels, which convert some of it to heat and some of it to electricity which in the end also gets turned into heat.
But desert projects get a pass on all this for some reason. I guess because, people don't like to live there. Same reason fuzzy mammals get protected status, while lizards and worms get nothing - human preference.
Thermal pollution on this scale is also going to cause local (or non-local) climate change, and we're going to need to deal with this at some point. There are no free lunches.
The best way to get an extra kW is to save it by improving efficiency or not wasting it in the first place. (Just as it's almost certainly cheaper to prevent the Earth from getting fucked up, complete with deflecting asteroids, than it is to colonize Mars.)
(Funnily enough, when I was designing a science fiction setting in the 1980s -- and of course like anyone paying attention I was already worried about global warming -- I posited that we'd be worrying about thermal pollution in the future. I thought we'd be using fusion power incredibly wastefully (flying cars, etc.) but life is always more complicated, and instead we're going to have thermal pollution from solar.)
Size of Sahara desert: 9,400,000km^2
I make that 0.00032% of the desert consumed.
I'm also confused about the idea of a desert "becoming" uninhabitable. The whole discussion reminds me of people talking about bird death effects only related to wind power, ignoring all other environmental and man-made causes. I do accept that the desert is an ecosystem of its own and the usual checks should be made that you're not eradicating the sole habitat of an endangered species.
Edit: there's even an environmental impact check in that EISA PDF from my other comment.
The Ouarzazate solar complex study area is not part of any protected natural zone; however, the following are located on its outlying zones:
The Mansour Ed Dahbi artificial lake, part of RAMSAR (site of the dam – located 6 km South of the site);
The Bouljir dorcas gazelle reserve (13 km to the North-West of the site);
The Iguernane Reserve (15 km to the North–West of the site);
The key site of Sbaa Chaab (20 km East of the site);
The Biosphere Reserve (solar complex in buffer zone B of the Biosphere Reserve).
None of the plant species found in the project site and its environs is considered rare or endangered.
The solar complex project site is considered to be of low heritage value.
The areas with high heritage value are located on the eastern and western reaches of the project site.Yet deserts have lots of life, unique life, that because of the harsh environment is exquisitely tuned to the desert environment. This is the stuff that will be lost if the sunlight is gone, the heat goes away, the moisture balance is upset by so much shade. Plentiful shade and cool and wet are good for people; disaster for the desert ecosystem.
The 'thermal pollution' is, curiously, cooling instead of heating in this case. Light is turned to electricity instead of falling on the ground and becoming heat.
The magnitude of the thermal pollution varies by technology. Morroco is planning a heat-concentrating system (boiling water with a giant parabolic mirror, in essence) which produces very intense heat in the middle and actually cools the land in the surrounding errors (since the mirrors will have a much higher albedo than rocks and sand). I'm not actually sure if this is going to be a net increase in heat absorption, so this might be a non-issue. (This form of solar generation is apparently more expensive than photovoltaics, though.)
The Union of Concerned Scientists is much more worried about water use, especially in arid areas, with such power plants.
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewa...
Photovoltaics (solar cells) are pretty much black and about 20-30% efficient) so they're absorbing more incident radiation than rocks and sand and then converting 70-80% of it to heat. We see similar effects from urbanization of desert areas (e.g. Phoenix and Las Vegas) so it's not like the effects will be unprecedented -- they just shouldn't be ignored.
I'm not down on solar, just pointing out it has its own potential downsides which shouldn't be ignored.
Frankly, after the initial setup, the shelter the panels provide will probably support more life than the open sand. Same as why environmentalists are ok sinking ships to provide a foundation for artificial reefs -- nature does not magically optimize for the most life-dense environment; it just is the way it is.
"More life" has never been the ecological impact metric. Why, a cattle feedlot has more life than the prairie that came before. And so on.
The desert is by no means lifeless. Some 50 species of mammals, endless snakes and arachnids (scorpions etc), many species of grass and brush. Even in the relatively-less-inhabited sand dune 'oceans' there is life.
But nobody is putting solar panels in the sand dunes. It will have to be on solid ground - rocky plateaus. Which are the most-populated of the Sahara environments.
No reasonable person is going to think that replacing 1km^2 of the central Sahara is equivalent to bulldozing 1km^2 of the Amazon. "More life" might be simplistic, so call it more life*biodiversity for total impact or whatever you want.
And in this specific example, the fact is that you are impacting almost no desert species in the dry parts of the Sahara. I suspect you are conflating low-moisture "deserts" like the Sonoran desert, where there is in fact life to impact:
http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTQQZ0DZRlKp1Ht0B-4W...
with the central sahara:
http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/09/550x366x152309...
Where no, there is really nothing to impact.
Your basically suggesting to protect the 'dust bowl' because you happen to be born after the disaster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
If there is one environment on the planet not in risk it's the Sahara. A lot of Egypt, Northern Africa, Iraq/Palestine would have looked like the American Midwest back when they were empires.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2965070/Solar...
No they are not. Species are dependent upon habitats for which they are adapted to. If a particular species is extremely local, it is strictly because the suitable habitat for their physical characteristics is extremely localized.
This isn't the Galapagos islands. This is the Sahara desert. To suggest that there is some habitat feature in one extremely small section of it that isn't present in others is just plain ridiculous. The main driver of extinction and endangerment in the Sahara has been over hunting by humans. Not habitat loss.
Because it's not an IMF loan?
The loan you describe is separate, as you say, a precautionary loan as a safeguard for oil price increases, indeed granted in 2012. Of course the opposite has happened, the price of oil dropped very sharply and so it makes no sense for the IMF loan to have been put into use on these grounds. Which is why it hasn't been, the $6.2b line of credit with the IMF expired in August 2014, without having been used at all. In July of that year, a new similar (this time, $5b) loan was negotiated, again precautionary as an insurance policy, and that, too, hasn't been used yet and that too isn't tied to any solar project. So I still don't see where you get the fact they're either 1) building this project with IMF money or 2) unlocking an IMF loan with this project, the facts suggest the IMF loan is unrelated, precautionary, not-used and the one you refer to specifically even expired already, how it could be unlocked after it expired is beyond me but you seem adamant. There's no IMF scheme here. Does the IMF have a relationship with Morocco? Absolutely, but it's not part of this project as far as I know, not indirectly either.
a rose by any other name...
"When they are finished, the four plants at Ouarzazate will occupy a space as big as Morocco’s capital city, Rabat, and generate 580MW of electricity, enough to power a million homes. Noor 1 itself has a generating capacity of 160MW."
Some info: http://www.cspworld.org/cspworldmap
Just give GW, it would be enough If you want to put to scale use something else (will provide the output of 1/2 hoover dams, will be able to supply 0.1% of US electricity or power 5000000 tumble dryers or 3 ATI cards) Homes just don't need electricity to exist ...
Can't we just get over it and accept that the only thing people generally have a good idea about is the power consumption of their own household, and as such using home energy consumption is what journalists have settled on? It's really the most pragmatic, and is only problematic when they're not providing the GW value.
The point he was making is that he doesn't know the exact number, but he knows how many household's worth it is.
As for knowing or not knowing the exact number, do people not read their electric bills?
Percentages are easier. This plant delivers 500 megawatt of power, which is 15% of the biggest nuclear powerplant of the US (or 7% of the biggest hydroelectric power plant of the US, or 2% of the world's biggest power plant, the Three Gorges Dam in China).
This helps putting in perspective the size of the plant in terms of what other endeavours of that kind offer and helps cope with the fact that the average person has no idea how many plants there are in the world and so how to relate the 500,000 houses number to the importance a given project might have.
And if you think the average person is going to find percentages of some arbitrary landmark then I don't think you understand the average person.
Still, I do agree that it’s easier to visualize with the number of households attached, inaccuracies be damned (at least if you do both).
PS: Interesting tidbit I just found out while doing some quick googling on this: Apparently the average US household consumes more electricity per month (more than 900 kWh) than I do in a whole year (roughly 800 kWh).
Think about this really hard.
You have a fair point about the arbitrary landmark though; mine was just a lame attempt at making an example.
The key point readers might want to quickly get at a first glance: is this a significant project or a drop in the ocean?
I don't think there is one good way of representing numbers, it's a complex matter because it's not about the number itself, it's about our perception.
I remember kayaking down the Colorado river. First day was hot and the Hoover dam upstream was running it's generators full tilt to power all the air conditioners in Vegas. River was kinda scary. Next day weather moved in and the temperature dropped 20 degrees. Air conditioners off, generators off. Now flow and the river was still with wind blowing upstream and we had to paddle all the way out for 8 miles.
If you look at the economics of journalism, it's understandable why they write this way (the economics view explains most of the ways modern journalism is crap), but it's disheartening that nobody minds writing about "calories" (which should be kcal), or "horsepower", but watts need a "X homes" explanation.
This is not the case with calories (I know that what I eat daily has about 2500 of those) or horsepower (I know that my car used to have 60).
In total France produces 63GW, with 70Mhab = about 1KW per inhabitant in average.
Maybe we need to have all BSC/Technical short lists for MP's to rebalance the HOC away from lawyers and carear politicians.
I don't know why you're getting uppity about this specific unit, but your post reeks of elitism and arrogance. You happen to understand what a watt is, so it's disheartening and sad that nobody else does (it's so lonely being so smart and being surrounded by dumb people)? Keep your shitty judgmental attitude to yourself.
Okay. 1000 watts are roughly one 1.3 HP, everybody knows what a horse power is. So a megawatt is 1300 hp and gigawatt is 1 300 000 hp. We use cars all day - we have idea how much a horse power is.
I know I'm shouting at the wind here, but I get the impression that most people today think education ends on high school, and after they graduate it they're not to be expected to ever go and look something up.
Anyway, if we are talking about any large quantity of anything we are given a reference point. People have trouble with large quantities they don't encounter in their everyday lives. Not because they are dumb but because they don't have a reference point. Say 100,000 pounds of food. How much is that? I don't know, "enough to feed 100 people for a year." I can understand that. (I made those numbers up)