Comment on Why can't countries with vast deserts make solar farms to power the world?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Others summed these points up quite nicely, but:
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The sand and remoteness makes installation and maintenance difficult.
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Heat is hard on electronics.
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At a huge enough scale, it would lower the albedo of the (normally very reflective) desert, heating up the local environment.
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Transmission. This is the biggest factor. Transmitting tons of power a long way is tremendously difficult, dangerous, slow to build, and expensive.
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Producing the things. It’s easy to say ‘just make more’, but you’d need to massively scale up every section of production: the mining, the transportation of the ore, the transportation of the panels, the production of the machines to fabricate the things, educating people to make those machines, all in a frayed global supply chain.
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Countries might feel uncomfortable being so dependent on each other for energy. Yes, the irony is tremendous.
moseschrute@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
For point 3, I assumed solar doesn’t get hot since it turns the light into electricity. Due to the conservation of energy and mass, it must reduce some of the heat by turning it into electricity, right?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is true to an extent, but the raw conversion efficiency is not that high:
www.nrel.gov/pv/interactive-cell-efficiency
At best, you’re looking at 30% for the most expensive experimental cells, minus other efficiency losses like dust or transportation.
…In practice, deployed panels will be less efficient than that. And I think that number excludes includes radiation frequencies outside the panel’s absorption range, yet hitting the panels anyway.
What I’m getting at is the sheer ‘darkness’ of the panels blows out the effect of converting a fraction of that radiation to electricity. The effect is still much more heat absorbed on the surface than light sand.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think the difference is that you’re conflating heat and light. Solar panels use photons to create electricity, not converting infrared heat to energy. So the heating really isn’t a factor in the energy created.