I'm amazed by the NIMBYism for the middle of the desert. Yes it's not completely devoid of life and impact, but as far as places for generating solar power go, it's about as good as you're gonna get.
Benefit/cost might be there, but for a project costing 22B it would be sensible to study and quantify.
Perhaps more importantly, you learn the biggest hurdles so that you can address them. For instance, the UK doesn't want its power to be at risk from political instability (more than it is already). That risk can be addressed in part by working with the local population: perhaps you allow for co-located grazing so you're not displacing herders. Perhaps encourage joint projects that also provide local power so that Moroccans benefit from the project (beyond just the ones in power).
What about security? It seems a bit concerning if 8% of UK's power can be knocked out in a single attack. How would you address that?
The only real accomplishment the global warming people have achieved is to make energy much more expensive and energy supplies much more unstable (e.g. california, europe)
Most environmentalists surely have good intentions, but they (like most people) are not experts on climate science and those that are have conflicted interests. For academics, you can only get one answer or you are cast out and shunned as a big oil lackey. For activist groups like greenpeace etc they only raise money by being alarmist. And then some are simply motivated by the desire to hurt western economies.
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2020/12/21/chinas_g...
Lousy activists shouldn’t invalidate the issues that inspired them.
Invalidates this: " If it were really as dire as environmentalists would have you believe, they wouldnt be fighting this kind of stuff (or nuclear)."
This is the fundamental driving emotion behind the environmental movement, and it's why almost any real environmentalist is against a technological solution to it. No nuclear, no wind farms (destroy landscape), no solar farms in africa.
The problem is humanity. It's a virus. It needs to be killed. There are too many people on the planet, we can't feed them, children are the worst thing for the environment, I'm sure you've heard all these things.
Meanwhile, 50% of 8bn people on earth will be overweight by 2030.
What's the cost-benefit of installing heavy transmissions infrastructure for the desert? The shore? The sea and ocean? Everyone and everything who live there? How vulnerable is that infrastructure to natural and artificial disasters, and what costs do we bear to build resilience to those outcomes?
Aren't surrounding communities also in need of strong consistent power? Why not move the power less distance (far less materials, less power losses) and serve a different population?
The classic thought-terminating cliche of if we covered X% of the Sahara we could power the whole globe obviously ignores the act of moving that energy from one place to another, which is a huge endeavor, to say the least.
Your argument is basically of the flavor "why is California still in a drought while the Mississippi river rages?"
"Don't build skyscrapers, build townhouses!" "Don't have checkstops, people die in car accidents anyway, instead we need to think about road safety" "Why build a huge energy project when small towns won't directly benefit in the next 5 years"
You would assume that the considerations have been made because it's basically a massive engineering project, it hasn't been posted to hacker news for the purpose of gathering theoretical conjecture in step 1 of the planning process, and that's how massive engineering projects tend to work, along with other political effects that aren't necessarily logical reasoning experiments to begin with.
The other is that rich and middle class people in the developed world build their own little microgrids that can easily withstand primary grid outages with all the economic inefficiency that entails. Batteries are relatively scarce still and are far more equitably deployed to the grid writ large than only certain households.
But of course perfect is the enemy of good which is why people are arguing about this online.
Sounds like you are asking "don't spend 22 billion on infrastructure for yourself, donate 22 billion to build infra for someone else"
Hopefully they require a split of the power as part of the building conditions.
If the desert supplied energy to the whole continent, it would free up other resources (eg gas) to power other countries. It’s a little different to your river analogy.
https://www.altestore.com/diy-solar-resources/solar-insolati...
Most of the rest of Africa has as good or better solar potential than these two countries.
Much simpler and cheaper and less error prone than a floating array of panels exposed to salt water and waves.
That said I too think that taking that hit will never be offset by all the faff of dealing with ocean water, waves etc.
Moreover the big installations in Morocco have not been PV but concentrated mirrors in which case any increase in heat is improvement and brooms are more important.
I certainly wouldn't assume they have "western" working conditions there.
So, yea, "some" have greatly benefited. There's a really common pattern to who those lucky few are; too, history hasn't changed here.
This is the typical blindness caused by any propaganda.
I don't see who this is an 'inverse problem' without a realistic alternative.
I think the answer depends on how well labor in those countries is rewarded for working at such facilities. So I certainly hope countries that are considering hosting those projects drive a hard bargain on price, starting by acknowledging that what they are giving up is real. The land use is a real concern, yes even in the desert.
Could you probide some examples of these concerns?
USA works for many years on destroying German industry. Starting from not allowing to build gas pipelines from Russia to Germany and eventually destroying them (I don't think that even brainwashed western population believes in that bullshit theory that 5 guys on a yacht destroyed Nord Stream). To the Volkswagen emissions scandal and plundering Deutsche Bank.
Russia always wanted to be a friend with Germany because that would be highly beneficial to both parties. USA always looked for a way to make that never happen and to destroy German industry.
USA succeeded, Germany has a bleak future ahead. But that is only tangentially related to energy import/export.
> Is it even a war Even Russian state-sponsored media/propaganda calls it a war these days. Denying the "Special Military Operation", as Putin wants it called, its approriate label of "war" only acts to support Russian propaganda and lies. Call it a war, because that's what it is. The 380th day of war of Putin's 3-day spec^Wwar.
> [USA] eventually destroying [Nord Stream] Who the actor for the destruction of Nord Stream was is still unknown, there have been multiple different stories about it now, all of them with some plausible and inplausible parts about them.
> Russia always wanted to be a friend with Germany Russia doesn't want to be friends with anyone. They (Putin and his mistresses) only strive to become a political, military and geographical superpower again using the same tactics other tyrants like Kim Jong-un are using.