Real Engineering
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2021–2024
18:20 · 8.1M views · Oct 23, 2021
Real Engineering looks at why Africa's abundant solar potential is hard to turn into usable power, especially for Europe. It covers the transmission, infrastructure and economic obstacles, and the pivot from concentrated solar to photovoltaics.
Linked whenever commenters ask whether Sahara solar could power Europe, as a clear explanation of why it is impractical.
10 comments from Hacker News
> why there's so much interest in nuclear when low-tech concentrated solar in the desert can get the job done and scaling it up (and ensuring it's 100% safe) isn't a matter of R&D but just basic manufacturing. Solar is dependent on the time of day (as the sister comments pointed out) and also on weather. Plus, you need to get the energy from the desert to wherever it's needed - this is non-trivial for densely populated areas far from the equator. You also need to maintain the solar panels; sand can be quite bad for their efficiency. Lastly, the areas that do have the space and solar power might be politically unstable, which makes the massive investments needed to get this going quite risky. Real engineering has a good video about this: this video
> we learned in geography class, that one could power the whole EU, if we occupied some area of the Sahara desert with solar panels I sometimes hear that too. The YouTube channel "Real Engineering" did a video about the idea: [1] The TLDR is: the Sahara definitely gets enough sun, but transmitting the power into Europe would be hard. [1]: this video
> Can we do the same in Europe and put massive solar panels in the desert of North Africa and import the energy northwards ? (I realize this is a super naive approach, and the main problem is energy storage rather than generation) A very good video from Real Engineering explains that no, not really: this video
Here's a great video from Real Engineering [0] that goes into the pros and problems with that approach, and where and how it is currently being tried. For example, via undersea transmission cable under the Strait of Gibraltar. [0] this video
Energy consumption is not an environmental problem (whatever you use said energy for, be it Bitcoin mining, heating your home or powering your massage chair), and all policies that try to limit energy consumption are basically building on quicksand and doomed to fail: the world has and will continue to consume increasing amounts of energy by capita. And anyone who's being an activist towards reducing energy consumption is completely deluded: energy consumption is strongly correlated with technical progress and civilization progress. Good luck putting an end to that short of reverting to the stone age. Energy production is what needs to be fixed, specifically energy production that results in environmental damage, e.g.fossil fuel. For reference, this video : this video claims that a million square km of the Sahara desert receives enough energy from the sun to power the entire human civilization needs in 2020. Solve the technical problems associated with solar energy production and you'll solve global warming. Infinite clean solar energy lets you filter CO2 out of the atmosphere back into carbon using technology, something plants have been doing to aeons.