It will cost you $210 to $450 to install a 350W solar panel in your home. In order to Install it in the desert it will definitely cost more. You have to build module mounting structures for the solar panels, move them nowhere, and carve out new electrical infrastructure in dunes and rocky ground. Let's take a rough estimate of what it would cost to set up in the Sahara Desert. Let's say $450 for panels and shipping, $300 for infrastructure, and $250 for mechanical structure and installation. This is a bulk price of $1,000 for the panel.

Our solar farm will cost $514 trillion, or about 23 times the cost of the US economy. Even if my estimate of the cost of solar panels is wrong, it shows the sheer cost of such a tremendous project and perhaps why no one has ever done it before.

Cost can be a big issue, but it doesn't matter. We're trying to save the world, but we're thinking with blue eyes! What if we had infinite money? Should we still do this?

Even if we could build this, we would have to spread this energy around the world. And countries like Australia will need power even when the Sahara is dark. Both problems are relatively easy to solve.

A huge battery pack is needed to store the energy generated during the day and power the farm at night. By building such a battery pack under the solar panel, you can avoid taking up any more space. Each solar panel has its own small battery to keep it powered day and night.

storage battery

Approximately 4.2 kWh of storage battery should be added to each panel (12 hours at 350 W output). This adds about $900 to the cost of each panel. That's almost double the total cost! But the budget is unlimited, so let's do it anyway!

So 51.4 billion solar panels and he has 215.9 billion kWh (215.9 TWh) batteries. I wonder how much of our carbon footprint went into manufacturing. Let's not think about it yet. We must first get power from the Sahara.

So does it make sense to run power cables from the Sahara Desert to Sindei? About 90,000 km.

Today the longest power line is 1,580 miles. Use very high voltages to limit the amount of electrical resistance. The higher the voltage, the lower the resistance. This means less current loss per km of cable. Long power lines can be expected to lose the performance of about 4% or more, as the upper limit for power line losses is about 4% or more, which no longer makes economic sense. Estimating 9,000 miles results in a 22.8% drop in performance.

Solar Plants From The Sahara Desert

But do you understand the picture? Storing and transporting energy around the world is inefficient. But we have unlimited money, baby! Spend your money. Not efficient, but saves the planet. right?

Yeah, you might want to stick your horse to it as long as it's climate-friendly. Because our dream project has a pretty big meaning besides taking the desert.

These solar panels will change the weather across the Sahara Desert and have a global impact. Half the reason the Sahara is a desert is the perfect atmospheric heater. Harvesting the sun's rays and converting them into electricity can effectively cool the desert. This means that the rain can return to the area and allow the plants to grow again. This has a domino effect, as plants cool the desert in the same way solar panels do, causing a snowball effect of vegetation, so the desert slowly turns greener.

Great, more vegetation! Oddly enough, however, many of the larger and more complex ecosystems depend on the barren desert of the Sahara. The Amazon is fertilized by dust blown across the Atlantic from the Sahara, and the heat of Sarahan rains incessantly through the Atlantic winds of my mediation. Clear the air of dust and cool the Sahara and you can beat the Amazon!

Solar Panels Sahara Desert

The Atlantic Ocean is also fertilized by dust from the Sahara Desert. Its nutrient-rich sand fuels giant algal blooms. These flowering events produce much of the Earth's oxygen, so we may also see a drop in oxygen levels! Cyclones and hurricanes are increasing. This will devastate the population of all of America! Imagine Hurricane Katrina occurring every few years. It's so harmful.

The most striking effect, however, is the counter-intuitive increase in surface temperature.

Behold, water vapour (clouds) is a powerful greenhouse gas, far superior to CO². When rain falls on equatorial regions like the Amazon, the greening of the Sahara makes the rest of the world wetter and cloudier. This traps heat and warms the earth.

water vapour (clouds)

But global warming will lead to the loss of ice caps that disrupt ocean currents, which in turn will cause a huge collapse in biodiversity around the world. prize. Methane and carbon dioxide trapped in Arctic sea ice would be released, causing massive climate change and a mass extinction that could cost humans.

So if we want to fight climate change, it's important to realize that we live on one planet. All ecosystems are connected by the global web. None of them is isolated. Once you start messing with one of them, it will have a domino effect on the others. Concentrating our global influence in one place is like pulling a Jenga block out from the bottom. This is a bad idea, in other words. Instead, you need to make tactical decisions about where to get your energy from in order to minimize your global impact. Like testing the tower blocks to see which ones are already loose, and not all fall out when you tear them apart.

There's one final reason you might not want to do this, and I haven't dissuaded you from thinking about it just yet. Although the Sahara looks like a vast wilderness to conquer, it is not. This country has been robbed and the African people and their governments own their resources. Europeans, Americans, and Asians all plundered Africa at some point in history for resources such as minerals, slaves, and land. Nothing more needs to be said, except that such barbaric acts must never be repeated. African countries have a right to this land and its energy. No other part of the world would try to take it away from them without the cooperation and fair payment. Countries like Libya and Egypt, which own a lot of land in the Sahara Desert, do not have stable enough governments to undertake such international projects. Do you spend hundreds of trillions of dollars on projects that may fail or be cancelled by the government that took the land from under you?