Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dumblydorr | Hacker News Reader

Saudi Arabia missed a huge opportunity in the 2010s. They could be one of the biggest solar players in the world, they are equatorial with a ton of cloudless desert land for utility scale. They waffled on their impulsive solar plans and they are years behind where smart policy could've put them.

Step back and just imagine: they are burning oil for electricity in one of the best solar markets possible. Burning oil for electricity is like using whale oil for lamps, it's harming your own society and planet due to myopic decision making.

View on HN

Domestic energy production is the least of its problems. It's worth reading:

- https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/venezuela-crisis

vs:

- https://web.archive.org/web/20100123225932/http://www.ft.com...

("The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil")

Saudi Arabia is making an effort of weaning its economy off oil per the submitted article and:

- https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/saudi-arabias-shaky-experim...

But it's still hugely dependent on oil, again per the submitted article and many others such as:

- https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/05/27/a...

Edit: there's four countries with sovereign wealth funds over 1T: China, UAE, Canada, Norway. Saudi Arabia is fifth, with 890B. According to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sovereign...

Their economy is basically broken, as is common for a rentier economy. I think the most alarming stat is that for the most part, the Saudi economy doesn’t actually involve Saudis; 90% of non-oil jobs in Saudi Arabia are held by non-Saudis, and only 30-40% of Saudis have or want a job. To a massive degree the Saudi economy is run by expats and migrant labor, and the important question is this: “Does Saudi have the ability to retain this labor once the oil money is gone?”

They have started doing just that, I believe. And waiting a bit seems like a good idea with solar, newer technology is more efficient, reliable and cheaper.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/saudis-...

https://www.arabnews.com/node/1615406/saudi-arabia

>They could be one of the biggest solar players in the world

And what would they do with that? They can't package solar-harvested energy and export it to China. They can provide regional power during daytime - but probably for more money than oil/gas ... and they will still need to rely on oil/gas for base-load, mornings, evenings and night-time.

Agree with your premise of not being able to ship it cheaply, but base-load does not exist for 10+ years anymore in most modern energy grids (at least not the way described by people who are saying we are badly reliant on fossils). And if you have this much space, at least for domestic energy, power storages would suffice for the night/non-sun periods.

It's tough today but there are paths to solutions. E.g. hydrogen storage

If it was easy, there would be no debate, and probably no opportunity.

> They can't package solar-harvested energy and export it to China

Yes, they can. Bulk industrial chemicals are portable and extremely energy intensive [1].

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/industry.p...

There was this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec and you can also store large amounts of energy in hydrogen or methane produced from electricity.

> They can't package solar-harvested energy and export it to China

Essentially that's what aluminum refining from bauxite does.

It's also not impossible to build long distance transmission lines that far, but that's a big infrastructure project across an unstable region and the highest mountain range on earth.

I've never heard of this as a viable economic way of storing solar power. Don't those aluminum forges have to run 24/7 and starting/stopping them is a huge pain in the ass?

I don't think they mean this as power storage, rather, shifting the location of power usage to the place where power prices could be ridiculously low. Smelting bauxite is an energy-intensive process. If you do it in China, you need to import the energy to do it. If you instead send bauxite to KSA they could use their cheap energy and send the resulting aluminum to China.

It's not storing the energy, it's making energy storage and transport a redundant step.

Not so much storing, as exploiting the locally-cheap energy.

Canada for example, was and still is, a major destination for bauxite ore. There are large hydroelectric dams in Quebec dedicated specifically to aluminum smelting.

Yeah, it is a pain with all smelters currently in use. There is maybe an alternative deign that could change that. But the idea here is not to store the energy, but to export it as chemical energy via aluminum.

There's a lot of money to be made converting industrial processes to be usable with intermittent energy sources.

https://www.aztlanchemicals.com/

Maybe. You have a massive capital outlay, so it becomes a tradeoff between saving money on electricity by running only when it's below a certain price and running all the time.

Usually electricity cost doesn't dominate the equation, so it makes sense to run 24/7 (or as close to that as you can get).

Aluminium refining is different, but usually those plants buy dedicated electric capacity from a hydro station at special wholesale rates. It does not lend itself to starting and stopping.

AFAIK, aluminium smelters would have significant issues if their pots overly cooled. OTOH, their massive energy consumption can be significantly modulated which is often used for grid load stabilization.

What does China have to do with it? If they can produce competitive solar energy I'm sure lots of middle east, europe and africa would buy up their watts. Egypt, Ethiopia, Turkey, Iran are all right next door.

Have you ever been there? Solar panels would be extremely useless because of the sand building up everywhere.

I mean, literally, people never open up their windows, because of the extreme amounts of sand in the air.

Far from accurate. The price of solar power in the Middle East is record low, on the order of 1 cent per kilowatt-hour.

My experience visiting there disagrees. They have a large amount of land, but they also have sandstorms, along with sand being everywhere. In the long run, the maintenance should outweigh the benefits, unless they find a way to deal with this issue.

And reality disagrees with you: https://www.sunwindenergy.com/news/35-mw-solar-farm-saudi-ar...

Here’s a more recent article. 1.35 cents per kWh. Abu Dhabi. https://cleantechnica.com/2020/05/06/abu-dhabi-will-have-the...

> unless they find a way to deal with this issue.

Cheap human labour from impoverished parts of Asia and Africa is one very possible option. The supply chains are already there.

I personally know a few people from villages in South India, who had been trained in that kinda job - dressing up in heat-controlled suits, driving sand-buggies and operating large-scale-wipers and cleaners - to keep panels clean. A similar one is in India too. And some of those firms put in place a locally adapted solution - which involves a lot of wastage of resources of other kinds (water, manpower).

More info: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/the-pros-and-con...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyWUjTxyWsk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V-8CY-5Oa0

To quote The Atlantic article that was linked in another comment

> The university houses an incubator for technology start-ups, including a firm founded on the premise that there’s good money to be made in keeping solar panels clean in the desert.

That's solvable though, there are setups for cleaning solar panels with robots on rails it'd be pretty easy to have a similar setup just dust off panels every few hours.

>robots on rails

That's a pretty fancy way to say motorized brushes on a timer.

Yep, but that’s how you get press and get funded. I’m not being cynical or joking.

Does the sand stick to the panels? Could the panels be tipped?

There is most likely static electricity involved, meaning that without mechanical action the finest of dust will stick the the panel even when you turn it upside down.

Cleaning is certainly a key issue as can be seen in this article:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0553-2?draft=coll...

However, there are a few complexities. Cleaning the panels continuously also causes the panels to degrade quicker. Robots for each string of panels is also a significant capital investment. Imagine an installation with hundreds of string of panels and robots for each one. In most cases panels are cleaned by human teams and not on a continual basis.

I feel like this is a solvable problem for solar panels.

Yea, at the very least couldn’t you just have something like a windshield wiper periodically wiping the sand away? Or vibrate it so the sand falls off?

It works for DSLR sensors.

I just looked it up. It's pretty much a solved problem: https://youtu.be/yJ6kxipkem0?t=111

PV cleaning robots are off the shelf products.

So tilt the solar panels a little so the sand falls off?

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about solar panel farms or desert sand.

The one project that attempted this with lofty goals, ended up with around 1% of the energy they claimed. Dust covering panels, abrasion, wind damage. Total fail.

Also, I'm surprised at the blasé way folks dismiss the total obliteration of the delicate desert ecosystem. Its like strip mining on a massive scale, to install square miles of solar panels. But everybody is on board for some reason.

There’s a lot of desert. If a few lizards and cacti get their habitat fucked so that humans belch less CO2 in the air affecting every species on Earth it’s a tradeoff I support.

See? There it is! Try to bulldoze one meadow for a development and you're killed in the press. But the desert doesn't get that respect. People seem almost proud of their disrespect for desert ecosystems.

Well that’s just humancentrism. The meadow delivers value to me while the desert does not. And most environmental policy is about preserving the environment for humans — after all, if we stumble into population collapse the rest of the world’s species will celebrate.

I mean, it's not like the Saharan Desert does anything useful, like feed nutrients (via dust storms that blow across the Atlantic) to the Amazon Rainforest that is the lungs of the world.

It will do that with a few hundred square miles of solar panels.

Not to nitpick, just to inform, but oceanic plankton produces more oxygen than all tropical rainforests combined. In fact, Prochlorococcus alone does more for our biosphere than rainforests.

A lot of species would collapse with humans.

Why would anyone care about desert? It's inhabitable space unfit for humans. I would happily replace all deserts with woods and grasslands.

The desert is habitable by plants and other animals.

Not every desert is the Atacama. Deserts in places like Arizona and Utah have tons of life.

Or just go straight to housing developments! Perfect habitat for humans. Because Ecology isn't a thing, and the planet isn't fragile at all.

I think you mean uninhabitable.

There are deserts and then there are deserts. The Mojave Desert contains a delicate ecosystem. The Rub' al Khali (Empty Quarter) contains a few scorpions.

So all of the buildings get burred in the sand? All the time? Whole cities? /s

You can put the up on raisers or roofs of buildings.

And even if you had the solar power, what would you do with it? There is very little industry or value-add in Arabia outside of oil. It would be easier for Europe to just build solar power in the south of Spain, Italy or Greece.

> it's harming your own society and planet due to myopic decision making.

Umm, we _are_ talking about a foreign-power-supported, semi-feudal monarchy which keeps most of the population in abject poverty while living like, well, kings and princes themselves. Benefiting society is not really priority #1 for the kingdom.

SA does have great solar potential, but there's really no point in investing trillions in solar production before panel efficiency improves. The cost per watt decreases wildly every year, so if you invest half a billion in last-gen panels...

Now, hoarding money and sponsoring solar efficiency research? Absolutely. But actually dropping the massive cap-ex on the solar farms was probably not a good move for SA itself (even if it was good for the world as a whole).

If you look at the inverter/module price trends[1], you'll see we've pretty much reached the bottom of the cost curve. Continued price reduction is coming from balance-of-system and soft costs (e.g. planning). So SA is probably in a good position now to buy modules and inverters, focus on innovation in the non-module pieces and policies to reduce soft costs.

[1]https://cleantechnica.com/files/2019/11/Installed-Solar-Pric...

> They could be one of the biggest solar players

But what's their advantage in solar? Lots of countries have plenty of sunlight, and some are closer to big markets. The pipeline infrastructure is useless. They don't have a manufacturing base, and most of their labor for it is foreign anyway, so could be more cheaply hired by putting the factory near the people. They don't have any home-grown high-tech.

I suspect that somebody else in their position could but not the Saudis. They have failed to diversify from on previous efforts due to baggage and cultural issues. Going adjunct tourist economy could be workable but not while remaining religious fundamentalists.

A assure you Saudi Arabia is not equatorial.

Does solar ... work very well when sent over long distances?

Maybe that is a weird question but mostly I see regional sort of solar generation that seems to offset other local power usage, and not so much mass generation for large scale export.

It costs a LOT of money to build high voltage transmission lines (AC or DC) to transfer power over long distances. So even if they turned the entire desert into a solar panel, the cost to ship that outside of the region would still be billions.

Sure, but maybe instead of building a indoors ski slopes in the middle of the desert, you invest that money into creating world class research institutes, create educational system and promote science.

Then maybe you would start inventing technologies that will push your country ahead. They could have created businesses based on solar tech and export it to the world.

Thats what China did, and it worked out miracles for them. Acquiring knowledge instead of buying ready solutions.

I'm not saying they can't do many things to improve (similar to many countries). All I was doing was answering a question to confirm that transmission lines are very expensive. They could use that cheap energy for certain kinds of manufacturing I suppose.

It all depend on electricity prices. There is a point where it is profitable regardless of the cost. As long as you can sell cheaper energy in a more expensive market.

The assumption is that they're not surrounded by countries willing to pay astronomical prices for electricity 24/7.

I don't know about distance, but I recently learned that they actually lose efficiency with extreme heat. [0]

[0] https://www.cedgreentech.com/article/how-does-heat-affect-so...

HVDC transmission losses are low, like 5% per 1000 km. So yes, a large, dispersed solar network could create and distribute electricity effectively.

it doesn't makes sense because long term the cost of transmission will likely be higher than the cost of production.

source: tony seba

They still have plenty of time to switch to solar domestically. Saudi Arabia's electricity consumption per-capita is only 75% of the US's, and their population is only 10%. Their domestic oil consumption is only a drop in the bucket compared to the export market.

How is domestic consumption relevant? They are a tiny population country.

The parent comment I replied to was about Saudi Arabia burning oil for domestic energy needs. My point is that switching their domestic use to solar is going to have almost no impact since it's a drop in the bucket compared to their export market. Unless you think they should stop exporting their only commodity and turn into Yemen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com