Tag: solar

Africa powering Europe

Not a bad start. With DC all the way to Norway, they could of course play a colossal game of battery charging across the continent.

Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5b on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East. More than 100 of the generators, each fitted with 1000s of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations, including Britain.

2017-06-19: Off-grid solar is making inroads in Africa.

Many Western entrepreneurs see solar power in Africa as a chance to reach a large market and make a substantial profit. This is a nascent industry, which, at the moment, represents a small % of the electrification in the region, and is mostly in rural areas. There’s plenty of uncertainty about its future, and no guarantee that it will spread at the pace of cell phones. Still, in the past 18 months, these businesses have brought electricity to 100Ks of consumers—many of them in places that the grid failed to reach, despite a 100-year head start.

2018-09-10: It would also green the Sahara

Canada sized Solar and wind farms could make the Sahara Desert green again with 2x the rain. With enough solar panels, albedo increases enough to cause lots of extra rain.

2023-05-13: If solar is so cheap, why hasn’t it scaled in Sub-Saharan Africa? Because do-gooders are lying.

Scaling Solar continues to be paraded as an example that the MDBs can use billions of dollars of ODA to catalyze trillions of private sector investments needed to fund sustainability goals. The facts tell a different story. Every $1 of concessional financing catalyzed only 28 cents of private sector financing. Scaling Solar’s official messaging masqueraded a heavily subsidized development finance program as a private sector driven solution. Governments canceled existing solar contracts citing Zambia’s purportedly unsubsidized low tariffs. Developers left the space because the deal economics no longer made sense.Beyond distorting market signals, the messaging perpetuated the myth that solar can be funded by the private sector in lower-income countries. Solar isn’t scaling in poor countries. The cost of capital is too high.

The IFC could take 3 actionable steps to return to the original vision of the Scaling Solar initiative:

  1. Acknowledge that expanding clean power access will continue to rely heavily on concessional DFI lending and guarantees to reduce the cost of capital.
  2. Transparently report explicit and implicit subsidies.
  3. Innovate to enhance power contract transparency, empowering market participants to scrutinize pricing drivers and prevent the accumulation of large undisclosed public debts.

Space Solar Power

None of the 4 new design concepts now offer as credible a price tag as the SERT designs, simply because sufficient funding has not yet been available to evaluate the uncertainties and develop sharp cost estimates. But in at least 3 of the 4 cases, there is excellent reason to expect that costs will be much less than 17 cents / kWh when we get there. There are important risks – but with all 4 options together, the objective risk of not being able to beat coal or fission on cost is probably less here than with any other technology large enough to meet all the world’s energy needs.

Why are we wasting time and money on ethanol again? Another company thinks 2500MW of space based solar power plants for $4b is doable. A similar nuclear reactor would come to ~$18b.
2021-09-01: With starship, this now seems feasible and perhaps inevitable.

Assuming a 70% transmission loss from orbit (beaming power by microwave to antenna farms on Earth is inherently lossy) we would need 60TW of PV panels in space. Which is 60k GW of panels, at 1 km^2 per GW. With maximum optimism that looks like somewhere in the range of 3k-60k Starship launches, at $2M/flight is $6b to $120b … which, over a period of years to decades, is chicken feed compared to the profit to be made by disrupting the 95% of the fossil fuel industry that just burns the stuff for energy. The cost of manufacturing the PV cells is another matter, but again: ground-based solar is already cheaper to install than shoveling coal into existing power stations, and in orbit it produces 4x as much electricity per unit area. Even if Musk doesn’t go there, someone is going to get SBPS working by 2030-2040, and in 2060 people will be scratching their heads and wondering why we ever bothered burning all that oil. But most likely Musk has noticed that this is a scheme that would make him unearthly shitpiles of money (the global energy sector in 2014 had revenue of $8t) and demand the 1000s of Starship flights it will take to turn reusable orbital heavy lift into the sort of industry in its own right that it needs to be before you can start talking about building a city on Mars.

2023-06-09: Prototype confirmation

A satellite has steered power in a microwave beam onto targets in space, and even sent some of that power to a detector on Earth. “No one has done this before. They’re bringing credibility to the topic by demonstrating this capability.” The transmitted power was small, just 200 milliwatts, less than that of a cellphone camera light. But the team was still able to steer the beam toward Earth and detect it with a receiver at Caltech.

2024-01-22: NASA study goes into great detail, and concludes

The following combination of revised assumptions yields SBSP solutions that are cost competitive with terrestrial alternatives, with lower GHG emissions:

  • launch cost: $50M per launch, or $500/kg; $425/kg with 15% block discount
  • electric propulsion orbital transfer from LEO to GEO
  • extended hardware lifetimes: 15 years
  • cheaper servicer and debris removal vehicles: $100M and $50M, respectively
  • efficient manufacturing at scale: learning curves of 85% and below

Global Grid

Converting the worlds power lines to DC would cost terabucks and save terawatts. it would allow for a global energy grid with all its load balancing advantages.

the premier global strategy is the interconnection of electric power networks between regions and continents into a global energy grid, with an emphasis on tapping abundant renewable energy resources – a world wide web of electricity.

2016-11-14: Asia Super Grid

Entrepreneurs in China, South Korea, Russia, and Japan have signed a Memorandum of Understanding that seeks to create the Asia Super Grid. It will transmit electrical power from renewable sources from areas of the world that are best able to produce it to consumers in other parts of the world. The idea is dependent on development of an ultra-high voltage grid operating at 1000 kilovolts AC and 800 kilovolts DC over 1000s of kilometers. It envisions interconnecting grids across regions, nations, and even continents with a capacity of 10 gigawatts.


2022-01-04: This doesn’t make a lot of sense for the reasons explained in this video: Huge cost for the grid, red tape.

Dye-sensitised Solar

“The refining of pure silicon, although a very abundant mineral, is energy-hungry and very expensive. And whereas silicon cells need direct sunlight to operate efficiently, these cells will work efficiently in low diffuse light conditions. The expected cost is 10% of the price of a silicon-based solar panel, making them more attractive and accessible to home-owners.”

hooray for bionano

Solar/Kinetic Weapons

I talked about rods earlier… also, I’m starting to get worried about trends in the direction of solar weapons, i.e., weapons that use the sun’s power to incinerate things. These have a lot of potential, and are potentially much stronger than nuclear weapons. It’s one of 3 super weapons that should be banned forever – nuclear (ICBMs), solar (beams), and kinetic weapons (meteors), with ascending severity.