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.
It's not NIMBYism because it's not my backyard. It's an attempt at environmentalism and cost-benefit calculations. It might turn out to be net positive, but you can't know that unless you consider the negatives first.
That's a stretch. We're literally talking about arid almost-wasteland. A few sq miles is a small portion, yet will provide clean power. The cost benefit is abundantly clear.
Given the benefits involved, the chance of it being net negative are basically nil. It's not worth delaying. Probably not even worth the money and time to investigate.
Its this kind of stuff that makes me think all the global warming hysteria must be overblown. If it were really as dire as environmentalists would have you believe, they wouldnt be fighting this kind of stuff (or nuclear).
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.
With every political problem: environment, racism, failing schools, terrorists, climate change, etc. the people in power need the problem more than they need the solution.
There are very real concerns but a whole lot of people talking about them have pretty shallow knowledge and just sort of jump on anything that sounds right. This is a problem with many issues that attract activists.
Lousy activists shouldn’t invalidate the issues that inspired them.
Because it's not actually about saving the environment, but about slowing down or stopping human and technological progress, because human progress is basically evil.
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.
Well, duh. I don't think anyone thinks "sun strong -> good for solar" is bad reasoning. What is bad reasoning is ending your analysis there.
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?"
I presume the existence of this project demonstrates that the cost/benefit analysis was done and the result balanced towards “benefit”. The most recent nuclear power plant built in England produces 3200MW and costs nearly $40bn so far. This cable will carry 10,500MW and costs $22bn. The latter number doesn’t includes the solar generation, but build costs for utility-scale PV are running less than $1/watt so 10,500MW of name-plate capacity would cost only another $11bn. Even at much lower capacity factors you’re still looking at less than half the cost per MW than nuclear.
If the surrounding communities are in need of power, they’re likely to get it cheaper as a result of the UK building there.
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.
they would be better off finding a use for the power in Africa. It like they have to pipe it in from so far just to... have it worthwhile. smh terribly thought.
I am uneducated in this particular field but my understanding is that salt water is extremely corrosive. Having reliable energy is not just about installation, but also about maintenance and continued operation. The latter is a challenge in a corrosive salt water environment.
There was an article a while back about placing solar panels on California aqueducts. This wasn’t really worth the cost in the analysis, until you considered preventing water loss from evaporation and saving on canal cleaning. I expect solar power from the ocean would lose money, if floating it on land is barely profitable.
Floating windmills sounds like a fun concept. I never heard of it but in theory, with cables securing it to the bottom and weights to keep it upright, I could see it work.
That makes no sense, that's like saying the costs of oil are rooted in Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Russia etc. and all the benefits go to other countries. Those countries have immensely benefited from selling oil to the world. How is solar power different?
Africa gets a lot of jobs they would otherwise never get. How is exporting your labor something bad? Countries try hard to get more exports, but once an African country does so, it's bad all of the sudden.
It’s geopolitically a terrible idea. Didn’t anyone learn any lessons from COVID about globalization? Or the Russia-Ukraine War? Even among countries that are close allies (EU) energy politics are a huge problem and countries that import energy always get the short end of the stick when there is a conflict of interest with the exporting country.
It always seems odd to me that countries are willing to go across international boundaries for such a vital part of the economy.
If they could just be self-sufficient with a load of nuclear power plants then they would have less political leverage problems
The UK in particular has a vast abundance of wind power off it's coasts. It makes more sense to double down with 22bn investment in wind!
These solar projects are good to start as they could empower more african nations with cheaper electricty. We just need more electricity everywhere if were going to drop the reliance on oil.
From what I understand, the UK actually has private companies ready and more than willing to build wind farms with their own money. The government is just inexplicably being slow at handing out the permits.
The UK has built a huge amount of offshore wind generation - in fact it had the most in the world until quite recently, and is currently second only to China. This just isn't a complete solution because wind is intermittent, and in particular it tends to drop off to nearly nothing during the coldest parts of winter when energy demand is at its highest. All of the solutions to this are about as speculative and questionable as this proposal.
It depends. Hopefully they source say 150% of requirements and not max them out so that losing 8% takes you yo 142%
and not a single led gets dimmed. Redundancy. But I also read how it is hard to stop / start generating power on demand so it might be costly to have so much redundancy.
While an undersea cable requires continuous operation and the agreement from a single country where it starts. If they suddenly decide for whatever reason to turn it off (say they're short of electricity) then the supply is immediately stopped.
You can stock it though, in case foreign countries cut supply short you're not suddendly out of power but instead have time to plan a negotiation or attempt to source it from elsewhere.
If the issue is just geopolitical independence, it's easy to stockpile uranium reserves. I believe France has several years worth of uranium stockpiled, so even if relations soured with all of our providers, which are pretty diverse, we would have a few years to react.
Some people don't like nuclear power plants and somehow that's more important to them than national/energy security.
UK (and France) already have the bomb; going renewable here rather than nuclear has nothing to do with proliferation. I don't see how (for the UK) it's anything except people's feelings are hurt by nuclear power plants.
For the rest of Europe maybe it's about proliferation. And maybe economies of scale make tagging along cheaper than local nuclear for Britain.
The UK is currently developing 12GW of nuclear power plants, and it is not exactly going great.
Hinkley Point C was originally quoted for £16 billion in 2012, which rose to £20.3 billion when construction started in 2017. It has been under construction for 6 years, they are 3 years behind schedule, and the cost is up to £32.7 billion.
Sizewell C is allowed to start construction and was scheduled to do so in 2021, but they haven't been able to finance it. Moorside was cancelled because Toshiba pulled out of the project, and Hitachi pulled out of the Wylfa B and Moorside plants leading to them getting shelved.
Not to mention that they are very controversial from an economic perspective. Hinkley Point C has a strike price of £92.5/MWh, while recent offshore wind projects have a strike price of £39.65/MWh.
In practice this means the consumer will end up paying to turn off wind turbine in order to run nuclear. It just doesn't make economic sense.
The UK has been valiantly trying to build new nuclear, but it's hard to find anybody that can do it, and it's unbelievably expensive if it even does get built.
I think that there was a narrow window in time where labor costs were low enough for nuclear to make sense, but in more advanced economies, highly labor intensive energy sources, as required by nuclear construction, are no longer viable. Advanced manufacturing capabilities have eclipsed construction technology.
On the money. Nuclear is too expensive and fragile, especially in this political environment. Also much more susceptible to sabotage in the event of a war, which is becoming a more relevant reality.
> It always seems odd to me that countries are willing to go across international boundaries for such a vital part of the economy.
Versus going across international borders for most other aspects of their economy? if the UK stopped international trade it would completely collapse anyway.
I fully agree with nuclear fusion power plants, but there is so much free solar power that is currently being “wasted”.
Nuclear fusion reactors are many decades away and hopefully that’s when our global power problems will be (hopefully) solved :-)
This planned link is very long distance, but UK is still part of a European power grid: it's normal for power lines to cross national (or State) borders.
Impossible in capitalism or with modern politics, but I planning for failure makes a lot of sense to me, and I don't mind having a power grid support 2x capacity.
Same for food, medicine, and general-purpose manufacturing (e.g. machine shops), for that matter.
- "Most controversially, the two other sites mentioned by Bouaida — Mahbes and Lemsid — are in the neighboring disputed territory of Western Sahara, which Morocco has claimed as its own for almost half a century, in defiance of the UN, which does not recognize the claim and lists Western Sahara as a non-self-governing territory."
Absolute madness to lead the article with lessons learned from Russian energy dependence, and segue into "let's put our eggs into this civil war basket-case". Never mind the moral arguments of investing in power plants on illegally annexed territory with no sovereign government. As a practical matter: what happens when conflicts break out again, and the keys to your high-value industrial economy are in some third-world warzone?
I just visited Morocco. And I asked the tour driver about Western Sahara being a different country. He immediately said it is not a different country but Morocco.
Morocco ended up in the web of French and Spanish Colonialism. It lost some land during independence, some of which ended up in formerly French Algeria after the French left up. Western Sahara was one of those territories where the King of Morocco had 350k people march into the land and tell the colonialists of the Sahara whose land it really was.
It is just bonkers that the UN does not recognize Western Sahara that Morocco has exercised sovereignty over for so long as part of Morocco. It just feeds into the idea that the UN is nothing more than a central conglomerated vasal of colonialist rule.
It’s insane how these articles somehow conjure up some kind of nonsensical bad for environment arguments. Putting solar panels in the desert is good for the environment. It reduces the ground temperatures and lets more plants and animals survive. It might also slow down further desertification.
I see where you're coming from, and I agree that the arguments highlighted in the article are rather unconvincing, but messing up with ecosystems ALWAYS triggers unintended consequences. Some might be good, others terrible.
I wouldn't be as definitive about the "good" in it as you make it sound.
To be fair, all industry is "messing with ecosystems", and in particular the energy industry is doing so with far more per-kWh impact, and globally. This is very much like the "birds vs. windmills" arguments. Yes, it's important to recognize externalities to any decision and have a plan for mitigation where needed. But at this scale, "look-here-is-a-problem" tunnel vision just creates paralysis.
It ignores the fact that climate change is disproportionally going to affect Africa and that doing nothing does not mean the status quo remains for nomadic tribes.
It means more desertification, less grazing area and greater poverty.
Sources please. AFIK there is no conclusive data out there backing the idea Africa will just turn into MORE desert from climate change.
I'd also like you to provide data showing green energy initiatives will reverse this trend anytime in the near future.
Africa is an already impoverished nation, how does greater grazing area help them? Are they going to use it for large amounts of livestock they can sell/slaughter? Is that making them less impoverished right now?
What will make Africa less poor is a lot of infrastructure, likely built off the back of fossil fuels. You know.. they same way all western nations industrialized and got to the point they could sit around worrying about whether they were hurting the environment instead of worrying about whether they have enough dung to burn so they can keep warm.
> Putting solar panels in the desert is good for the environment.
This is categorically false. Solar panels actually increase the ambient temperature in the area [0]. Directly under a panel will be cooler, but those areas are 1. Heavily disturbed, with most the native plants an animals destroyed on installation and 2. Small compared to the total affected area.
Solar fields take up a large amount of space and installing a new one involves damaging a lot of native landscape.
Despite the drawbacks I think that solar is usually quite a bit better on net than the energy it's replacing, but we should still be clear about the costs and drawbacks.
In this case the ecosystem in question has even less in the way of native plants and animals (to my understanding) than the semi-arid American Southwest landscapes usually examined in research papers on the topic. But yes the general point holds that a cost-benefit analysis is worthwhile, though here it likely is quite net-good.
It’s different, but hard to say if it’s better or worse globally. Dust from the Sahara plays a major role in cloud formation and transporting nutrients to the Amazon basin.
I doubt it would be significant for the Amazon in the short term, but it could mean less frequent but larger tropical storms in the mid Atlantic which then pound the east coast. Perhaps it’s a net good globally and just bad for America and the Caribbean, I don’t actually know.
However, these plans don’t actually involve that much land so the net effect is probably minimal compared to the gain from reducing natural gas useage.
Hasn't North Africa only been a desert for a few thousand years? It's not exactly some perfectly balanced ecosystem that has existed for a million years or something. Really, it turning to a desert was an ecosystem collapse... Second, Africa is HUGE. The amount of land they would be using for this must be minuscule compared to the area of this ecosystem. Third, not all ecosystems are equal.. The biodiversity of some areas is so much higher than others, it's not comparable. An acre of rain forest must be worth more than an acre of desert.
Just because an area has gone through climate change in the past is not an argument that current climate change, which is happening at an accelerated rate, is acceptable. It is that rate of change that makes our current risk so high.
Having said that, I agree that the impact of putting solar panels in this are is likely much less and more local than the impact of burning the fossil fuels that they solar would offset.
> Putting solar panels in the desert is good for the environment
Instead of altering unique grassland and desert ecosystems, and displacing nomadic tribes, the better option for 'the environment' and its peoples would be to build nuclear power plants.
You're not wrong, and I'm as pro-nuclear as it gets (would love to see moonshot-scale projects to fully nuclearize as much of the globe as possible), but... we can have both.
If large scale solar deployments in the sunniest, most hostile parts of the planet are available sooner than our nuclear dreams could come true, then I say hurrah.
Desertification destroys formerly fertile ecosystems. People die. The few extra-adapted species and the few people that remain are not an argument for protecting deserts.
edit: I know that this is some political compass meme, but i know way too many real-life people who are into green everything, but are afraid of nuclear.
Nuclear power plants are great, but you need to maintain an energy mix that doesn't make you dependent on a single source.
Consider the French nuclear infrastructure; by Sept 22, 32 of 56 reactors were off for maintenance or technical problems. Several reactors were affected by a welding issue that created cracks and made them inoperable.
Changing the natural state of the desert environment is good for the environment? the desert is full of plants and animals that are adapted to it already.
By definition, energy = transformation of the environment. The more energy we use, the more we transform our environment. Which most like isn't good for the environment, and eventually for us since we depend on this environment too.
One of the pictures in the article shows one of those giant mirror arrays. They have one in the Eastern CA desert near Vegas. They reflect all the energy in a big circle into a single point, which when you look at it is at like, a near-sun-level of brilliance, where it (presumably) boils lots of water to run turbines or whatever.
Perhaps they're going to use those instead of all the rare earth complexity that is photovoltaics.
There are similar plans to power Singapore with Australian solar. And Norway is exporting hydro to Europe via underseas cables. And the UK and Norway are planning to exchange wind and hydro both ways. Connections by cable are a game changer. Easy to understand and proven technology.
It's an often overlooked factor in renewable energy. Yes intermittency seasonality is a thing. But it's a local effect that you can compensate for by connecting to other intermittent sources of energy. They won't all fail at the same time on average. And if you interconnect enough different sources, the system as a whole gets more predictable and resilient. It's not all going to fail at the same time everywhere.
It's not even seasonality - it's just weather. It's extremely rare to find a place that gets no wind and no sun and has nowhere within say 1000km that doesn't have a different weather pattern.
Mountains and water bodies are things that affect weather, and generally population centers are separated by them.
Unfortunately not true, at least for wind energy in europe. It tends to fall (or blow) all over europe at the same time.
And, even worse, the wind tends to stop blowing in winter when it is extremely cold (highest demand days) and there is virtually no solar. It's becoming a serious problem in Northern Europe.
According to NYTimes [1] Die Zeit [2] and Financial Times, a rogue billionaire with a yacht and a team of 6 people can blow up natural gas pipelines that were hardened under concrete.
So how on Earth do you expect to secure such a massive length of cable?
There’s a 0% chance the Nordstream pipelines were disabled by a few scuba divers in a sailboat.
I sail a 45’ boat. It would not be in any way possible to deploy 500kg of explosives over 100s of kilometers to a depth of 80m from my boat, even if I was given ample time to retrofit with specialized equipment to support the operation. And this fable claims they merely chartered a vessel!
Exactly. I was being sarcastic. Yet this is what passes as intelligence these days. After Sy Hersh's exposé on what happened to those pipelines [1], they had to come up with an alternative theory and that's the best they could do. This wouldn't pass the second reading of a B-movie plot.
My point was that undersea cables and undersea pipes are now a "fair game" and in the future we will see these kinds of infrastructures suffer all kinds of incidents. It's lunacy to go forward in today's geopolitical climate with massive projects that have an attack surface that's thousand miles long.
They do need more capacity to/from EU, but it's not a bad idea to add extra path diversity to increase reliability of the system. A direct undersea HVDC cable is going to have far less conversion losses than converting to AC, going through Spain, and then another HVDC conversion to hop over to the UK... Even more so given most of the current and proposed cables are via France.
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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?"
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.
Dead Comment
These solar projects are good to start as they could empower more african nations with cheaper electricty. We just need more electricity everywhere if were going to drop the reliance on oil.
Here is a crazy idea: don't put all your eggs in one basket. Try to do both.
This project only addresses 8% of UK needs, plenty of room for other sources in the portfolio.
How is this a bad thing?
Given that most countries don't have a source of uranium, I don't see how this is any better from a geopolitical security perspective.
15 countries mining it currently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
There are also more countries with estimated reserves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
While an undersea cable requires continuous operation and the agreement from a single country where it starts. If they suddenly decide for whatever reason to turn it off (say they're short of electricity) then the supply is immediately stopped.
UK (and France) already have the bomb; going renewable here rather than nuclear has nothing to do with proliferation. I don't see how (for the UK) it's anything except people's feelings are hurt by nuclear power plants.
For the rest of Europe maybe it's about proliferation. And maybe economies of scale make tagging along cheaper than local nuclear for Britain.
Hinkley Point C was originally quoted for £16 billion in 2012, which rose to £20.3 billion when construction started in 2017. It has been under construction for 6 years, they are 3 years behind schedule, and the cost is up to £32.7 billion.
Sizewell C is allowed to start construction and was scheduled to do so in 2021, but they haven't been able to finance it. Moorside was cancelled because Toshiba pulled out of the project, and Hitachi pulled out of the Wylfa B and Moorside plants leading to them getting shelved.
Not to mention that they are very controversial from an economic perspective. Hinkley Point C has a strike price of £92.5/MWh, while recent offshore wind projects have a strike price of £39.65/MWh.
In practice this means the consumer will end up paying to turn off wind turbine in order to run nuclear. It just doesn't make economic sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
I think that there was a narrow window in time where labor costs were low enough for nuclear to make sense, but in more advanced economies, highly labor intensive energy sources, as required by nuclear construction, are no longer viable. Advanced manufacturing capabilities have eclipsed construction technology.
The UK, for example, imports nearly half of its food.
Versus going across international borders for most other aspects of their economy? if the UK stopped international trade it would completely collapse anyway.
Deleted Comment
(That, and nuclear weapon ambitions.)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Impossible in capitalism or with modern politics, but I planning for failure makes a lot of sense to me, and I don't mind having a power grid support 2x capacity.
Same for food, medicine, and general-purpose manufacturing (e.g. machine shops), for that matter.
Absolute madness to lead the article with lessons learned from Russian energy dependence, and segue into "let's put our eggs into this civil war basket-case". Never mind the moral arguments of investing in power plants on illegally annexed territory with no sovereign government. As a practical matter: what happens when conflicts break out again, and the keys to your high-value industrial economy are in some third-world warzone?
Morocco ended up in the web of French and Spanish Colonialism. It lost some land during independence, some of which ended up in formerly French Algeria after the French left up. Western Sahara was one of those territories where the King of Morocco had 350k people march into the land and tell the colonialists of the Sahara whose land it really was.
It is just bonkers that the UN does not recognize Western Sahara that Morocco has exercised sovereignty over for so long as part of Morocco. It just feeds into the idea that the UN is nothing more than a central conglomerated vasal of colonialist rule.
(paraphrasing) "It's an interconnected world. We'll just take it in our stride!"
There. Do you feel better now?
I wouldn't be as definitive about the "good" in it as you make it sound.
Unintended consequences are possible/likely/imminent, but that doesn't mean they are always unexpected/uncontrollable/cataclysmic.
It ignores the fact that climate change is disproportionally going to affect Africa and that doing nothing does not mean the status quo remains for nomadic tribes.
It means more desertification, less grazing area and greater poverty.
I'd also like you to provide data showing green energy initiatives will reverse this trend anytime in the near future.
Africa is an already impoverished nation, how does greater grazing area help them? Are they going to use it for large amounts of livestock they can sell/slaughter? Is that making them less impoverished right now?
What will make Africa less poor is a lot of infrastructure, likely built off the back of fossil fuels. You know.. they same way all western nations industrialized and got to the point they could sit around worrying about whether they were hurting the environment instead of worrying about whether they have enough dung to burn so they can keep warm.
This is categorically false. Solar panels actually increase the ambient temperature in the area [0]. Directly under a panel will be cooler, but those areas are 1. Heavily disturbed, with most the native plants an animals destroyed on installation and 2. Small compared to the total affected area.
Solar fields take up a large amount of space and installing a new one involves damaging a lot of native landscape.
Despite the drawbacks I think that solar is usually quite a bit better on net than the energy it's replacing, but we should still be clear about the costs and drawbacks.
[0]https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070
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I doubt it would be significant for the Amazon in the short term, but it could mean less frequent but larger tropical storms in the mid Atlantic which then pound the east coast. Perhaps it’s a net good globally and just bad for America and the Caribbean, I don’t actually know.
However, these plans don’t actually involve that much land so the net effect is probably minimal compared to the gain from reducing natural gas useage.
Having said that, I agree that the impact of putting solar panels in this are is likely much less and more local than the impact of burning the fossil fuels that they solar would offset.
There are no ecosystems like that. It's not even a possibility.
Instead of altering unique grassland and desert ecosystems, and displacing nomadic tribes, the better option for 'the environment' and its peoples would be to build nuclear power plants.
If large scale solar deployments in the sunniest, most hostile parts of the planet are available sooner than our nuclear dreams could come true, then I say hurrah.
In real life, deserts grow.
https://www.google.com/search?q=desertification&oq=desertifi...
Desertification destroys formerly fertile ecosystems. People die. The few extra-adapted species and the few people that remain are not an argument for protecting deserts.
...which also give power at night, which is a must!
...but: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/500/574/f4e...
edit: I know that this is some political compass meme, but i know way too many real-life people who are into green everything, but are afraid of nuclear.
Consider the French nuclear infrastructure; by Sept 22, 32 of 56 reactors were off for maintenance or technical problems. Several reactors were affected by a welding issue that created cracks and made them inoperable.
Edit: typo.
panels don't produce that much power, you need a lot of them
Perhaps they're going to use those instead of all the rare earth complexity that is photovoltaics.
You seem to have a bit of cognitive dissonance happening with your thought process here.
You want climate change if it's caused by "green energy" but not if it's caused by fossil fuels? Is that your stance?
It's an often overlooked factor in renewable energy. Yes intermittency seasonality is a thing. But it's a local effect that you can compensate for by connecting to other intermittent sources of energy. They won't all fail at the same time on average. And if you interconnect enough different sources, the system as a whole gets more predictable and resilient. It's not all going to fail at the same time everywhere.
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/australia...
It's not even seasonality - it's just weather. It's extremely rare to find a place that gets no wind and no sun and has nowhere within say 1000km that doesn't have a different weather pattern.
Mountains and water bodies are things that affect weather, and generally population centers are separated by them.
And, even worse, the wind tends to stop blowing in winter when it is extremely cold (highest demand days) and there is virtually no solar. It's becoming a serious problem in Northern Europe.
Deleted Comment
"UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned"
110 points, 243 comments
So how on Earth do you expect to secure such a massive length of cable?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/us/politics/nord-stream-p...
[2] https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2023-03/nordstream-2-ukr...
I sail a 45’ boat. It would not be in any way possible to deploy 500kg of explosives over 100s of kilometers to a depth of 80m from my boat, even if I was given ample time to retrofit with specialized equipment to support the operation. And this fable claims they merely chartered a vessel!
Complete lunacy.
Exactly. I was being sarcastic. Yet this is what passes as intelligence these days. After Sy Hersh's exposé on what happened to those pipelines [1], they had to come up with an alternative theory and that's the best they could do. This wouldn't pass the second reading of a B-movie plot.
My point was that undersea cables and undersea pipes are now a "fair game" and in the future we will see these kinds of infrastructures suffer all kinds of incidents. It's lunacy to go forward in today's geopolitical climate with massive projects that have an attack surface that's thousand miles long.
[1] https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the...
Instead you'd have Spain use them, then Spain might transfer excess power from its north to France, which in turn would transfer more power to the UK.
That it isn't being done like that is interesting in itself. I wonder what the mix of technical and political reasons is.
To a sibling comment saying "Brexit", that's clearly not the case, as a graph in this article shows:
https://www.powerengineeringint.com/industry-insights/britai...