BBC News - Harnessing desert sun to power Europe
It is a beguiling idea - harvest sunshine, and a little wind, from the empty deserts of North Africa and the Middle East, and use it to produce clean power for the region and for Europe.
Desertec, a group based in Germany with heavyweight commercial backers including Siemens and Deutsche Bank, says the scheme would also bring the regions around the Mediterranean closer together, while providing jobs and stability for the countries in the south.
It has chosen Morocco, which is embarking on its own ambitious solar [...]
It makes more sense to create smaller capture devices that can be placed locally and then, where possible and reasonable, connected to create a stable grid supplied from many diverse sources. Also, how long d'ya s'pose it'll be before the areas where sunlight is captured cool down, become more temperate (and habitable), these huge plants no longer function properly and everyone who depends upon them is screwed? That's going to happen anyway, desert regions eventually become temperate regions again, and cold, and then they warm up, but on a large-local scale (not global, although the effect may be felt worldwide) this and any other large-scale operation to remove energy from any part of the environment, even wave energy, any energy removed from the system makes some difference - it's up to us to find ways to balance what effect that removal hase and how to balance the effects of various kinds of capture against one another - will certainly speed things along. That's another reason for small local energy production, so that where we may have hydroelectric our neighbors may have geothermal and our other neighbors may have boiler heat produced by wood, oil, gas, whatever, another might have solar, another wind. Then no resource is heavily affected but if we share energy across our local grid, neither is anyone screwed when their source is unavailable for a time. Of course, the ones who could but refuse to fill their gas tank or keep their solar panels maintained or do whatever it takes to contribute to the grid will likely be the first ones refused access when energy becomes short through any means for some reason, but until then there'd probably be enough to take up the slack for people who couldn't provide energy or just didn't want to (again, those latter being the first to feel it when power is short). Just sayin', it solves an awful lot of the problems they're foreseeing with this grandiose (and heavily corruptible) idea.
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