I wonder if having areas of the desert under permanent shade will influence the local ecology in some way. I suspect insects and such will start to gather there to get out of the sun to begin with at least.
If there are any changes they are probably for the better though.
There is some recent research that shows you can do some nice companion farming with solar, in very arid places. The plants get enough light, but also get shade and have reduced irrigation requirements.
The logistics of planting and harvesting plants under solar panels sounds tricky though.
If the panels are high enough up to be able to fit a tractor/harvester under them, the cost of foundations and pillars is going to get high, plus the extra complexity of 'working at height' to install and maintain them.
The deep Sahara isn't really like the typical American Sonoran desert -- where there are cacti, hawks, scub-grass, etc.
Large parts of the deep Sahara is just... sand, and a few rock outcroppings. I'm sure there's some tiny microbiome I'm missing, but it ties anywhere on earth (except maybe the deep Antarctic ice sheets) for "completely devoid of life."
Any infrastructure requires some trade-off... but this really is a pretty good one.
About 3 miles x 4 miles at 24.425359, 32.719888 . It is an insignificant percentage of the Egyptian desert about 30 miles north and a little west of the Aswan Dam. It's probably a good location to feed into the power grid that distributes the power generated by Aswan Dam.
That place is absolutely massive! For a simple comparison, add about 6,500 more solar parks of that size, and we would generate enough electricity* for the entire planet. That would cover an area of 242,000 square km (which granted, is about the size of the UK, or a bit smaller than Texas). 2,500 solar parks of that size would replace all coal plants globally. 1,500 would replace all natural gas plants. So that is 4,000 of those to replace all fossil fuel plants that now exist.
Of course things like base load generation and you know...night time need to be taken into consideration, but I think it really puts it all into perspective. A few more years at their current growth, and renewables will be generating more electricity than coal globally. Coal is also decreasing which helps.
I used some data from here to make rough estimates:
global energy use is unfortunately growing quickly so the most likely outcome is that we continue the trend where new power sources don't replace dirty older sources, they live on beside them.
"China and India have accounted for 85% of new coal power capacity since 2005, according to the Global Energy Monitor report. China permitted construction for the generation of less than 5GW of coal power in 2018, compared with 184GW in 2015. India permitted less than 3GW in 2018, compared with 39GW in 2010. India has added more solar and wind power capacity than coal over the last two years"
Renewable and natural gas generation is approaching or undercutting the marginal cost of operating coal plants in many areas. This isn't accounting for amortized costs of coal plant construction, simply the fuel and operations cost. So coal is well on it's way out. China and India have all but stopped planning new plants.
Natural gas is some ways away from being overtaken by renewables, but trends need only hold for a fairly short period for that crossover to occur.
The future isn't all rainbows yet, but things do seem to be headed in the right direction. Economics strongly disfavor the carbon economy going forward.
$33 is under 1/2 the price of new coal generation. To the engineers who build this stuff it's all over - talking to them they seem to thing the long term price of generation and storage will drop to near 0.
25 years is the duration of the contract; the plant does not become defunct at the end of that period.
Projects like this are contracted over fairly long initial periods to cover capital costs and so forth, but not so long that governments are locked into bad deals long-term. At the end of a contract period, a new deal is negotiated to continue operations unless it isn't beneficial to do so.
Solar plant operations and maintenance costs are relatively low compared to other kinds of generation, so it's unlikely that the plant will become defunct at the end of the 25 year period.
Solar panel performance at the end of a 25 year period will likely be between 90-80% of initial performance. This is well within what is required for useful economic generation. Most likely, a new deal with be made at lower prices because no capex is needed.
Panel degradation is relatively constant at ~0.6-1% per year. This means that a well-performing panel would be producing 50% of it's rated output after a century, or 36% with poor performance.
In 20 years the park would have recovered it's investment with a profit. It could keep running after but they will need to calculate if to keep running those or installing newer more efficient panels will be more profitable. BTW the original calculation of $26trillion is an over estimation as even a $100 billion investment brings down costs further as solar is still an improving technology.
I wonder if we'll see a shift in energy politics as equatorial countries become sites for significant energy generation.
The cynic in me says no, we'll just see existing players exploit those countries, but the optimist in me says there's a chance that many communities could see an economic boost or even transformation if they can get sufficient energy exports set up.
The middle east has done pretty well for themselves fiscally speaking, it is still not very politically stable, but they have a lot of money now from significant energy generation.
If we could place a huge solar farm in the Sahara and find a way to transport this energy worldwide, I think it would be great for them. They wouldn't have to transport directly, they could create some sort of fuel that could easily be transported all over the world.
There are hundreds of ways forward to a sustainable future and the technology already exists, and the political landscape is getting better every day. People aren't just going to give up, they are going to keep complaining until something is done. The majority of the world seems to know what is going on and they are upset about it. They aren't going to calm done until we are on the right path.
HVDC (high voltage direct current) networks can actually move electricity on an order of hundreds of miles with single digit % losses. There are further losses though during the switch from solar DC to AC, where voltage is then stepped up, and again back to DC for the transmission.
Not awarding the project as a whole to a single contractor seems like a good way to derisk it. There might be problems with one or the other contractor but a complete failure seems more unlikely because of that.
Is my intuition correct here?
From the Google maps satellite images, it looks like there's a range of technologies that have been chosen for the panels and trackers too. That also presumably reduces risk of a large single failure mode as the panels/trackers/inverters start to age.
I'd really like to see the details of who these 200-300 contractors are. There is a major problem with Egyptian government contracts being awarded to the military or companies owned by generals.
I hope it was as competitive and efficient as the article alluded to but have my doubts.
As yet another bonus, it seems like a good way to head off corruption (assuming they had a maximum number of plots per contractor): you can only bribe your way up to a ceiling number of plots.
Electricity is power, and Sisi knows this. His predecessor lost support during a few hot summer months of rolling power-cuts. It was rumored that those power cuts were the product of sabotage by electricity ministry managers. But since Sisi came to power he payed Siemens a small fortune to import power stations and stabilize electricity production.
Regarding the energy situation, I've also heard that Egypt is also rushing to get their new gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean sea up and running as fast as possible.
Someone mentioned the Aswan dam nearby; that would provide a good counter-controllable source of power. But in general it's going to be predictably sunny in the desert and align well with AC usage.
This is actually a somewhat normal occurrence and you encounter it frequently enough. Different zoom levels sometimes correspond to different sources of imagery, sometimes months or years apart.
My home still disappears at certain zoom levels, and I see the construction site instead - it was built in 2016.
I understand new high resolution data not being available for all areas. But generally I would have expected them to default to either the newer or a downscaled higher resolution source.
it's appearing/disappearing suddenly between two levels of zoom, there must a switch of images library that were taken before/after the start of the construction.
If you look at the copyrights at the bottom of the page that's exactly what's happening. It switches from "Maxar technologies/CNES/Airbus" to "Landsat".
> To combat the latter [i.e. dust], employees will clean all the panels at Benban once or twice a month by passing by in specialized tractors equipped with brushes
Something 100-200 meters across is visible as a spec from low orbit. A square kilometer is reasonably easy to see. There's an estimate on wikipedia that to read text from the ISS the letters would need to be 2km tall.
This solar park is 37 square kilometers in almost a square. Well over all those thresholds.
> Space is about 100 kilometers away. That's far away—I wouldn't want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn't that far away. If you're in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.
It's important to note that "barely space, by consensus" and "able to orbit properly" are significantly different heights.
100km is where there's barely too little air to keep a plane up, and you have to be moving at orbital speeds. But you still need a lot of constant thrust to stay up there.
Even at 200km, your average object will fall out of orbit in a day.
At 300km you're reasonably stable, with about a month of orbit life if you don't boost.
At 400km you find the ISS, where orbit life is somewhere around a year.
There are a lot of milestones between 50km and 600km where you could pick any one and make a reasonable argument that it's the edge of space.
Sigh. The recent drone attacks on infrastructure in Saudi Arabia have dramatically changed things. A single drone dispensing small cluster sub-munitions could destroy a large swath of solar panels.
I fear that large-scale asymmetric warfare will become more common, especially in the volatile Middle East.
Not really... Solar panel farms are spread out and huge. And oil refinery are much smaller and have some very valuable parts you can specifically target.
Any drone big enough to carry 'small cluster sub-munitions' to do any sort of serious damage to a solar farm will be big enough to get noticed immediately by the military. Couldn't even dent 1% of the panels with what was used in Saudi Arabia.
It's probably less vulnerable than any other concentrated form of power generation. Hands up those who'd like to see Egypt finish their nuclear program and build a nuclear reactor within drone range?
I mean, seriously, it sounds like the opposite. The events in Saudi Arabia have shown how much more vulnerable oil is, with the production pipeline going through much smaller (in terms of m^2) bottlenecks.
You could wipe out millions of gallons/day of production with a well-placed strike, affecting the entire global market, while solar farms are much bigger (a hit will wipe out a smaller percentage) and the effects are more localized.
It would be too easy for electro-terrorists to stop production at the solar park: four drones (one on each corner) could simply airlift a rectangular 3x4 mile opaque tarp from Sudan or outer space and drop it over the panels. Probably only take 15 minutes. Drones and tarps are available for a low price on Amazon. This is a scary possibility. Egypt must fund anti-drone defenses today!
I guess they could break the job down: use one team of 4 drones to lift multiple 1 square yard tarps.
Let's see, 12 square miles is roughly 37 million square yards. Multiplying by four they would only need about 150 million drones. Quite affordable for today's well-funded terrorist with an Amazon Prime account (as long as they choose 3-5 business day shipping instead of overnight).
The standard approach, as was used in Iraq, is to dispense foil streamers or other conductive chaff over the substations. The US used airplanes, but these days drones could do the job. Or you could use a drone to tow a copper wire across one of the high-voltage distribution power lines. If done on enough lines at the same time the sudden decrease in load may cause the generators to overspeed.
Apparently there's talks about covering the pyramids with solar panels too, since tourism has been declining in the last few years. Now with this new Solar Park, I doubt it will be necessary anymore.
There is so much land (vast, empty desert) available for solar farms, why would they undermine one of the main draws for tourists by fouling the pyramids with solar panels?
There is also speculation a single face of the pyramids would remain revealed, so that it would be possible to create an artifical snow-slope during the cold desert nights, increasing demand for Egypts famous ski-mittens.
If there are any changes they are probably for the better though.