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Comment by csunbird | Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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

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...

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.

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.

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?

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.

It works for DSLR sensors.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I think you mean uninhabitable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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