There are three types of PV: moncrystalline (expensive but high performance), multi-crystalline (cheaper but still good) and amorphus (crap performance but cheap). Nano is (I think) going the amorphous route - I'm intrigued with respect to the claimed efficiency (60% gee! and I thought amorphous was only good for 6%).

The Israeli's may be better sticking to solar i.e. genrate heat, and use it to power steam turbines - main benefit - could store the heat and use at night.

Even if you did generate all the worlds electricity in the Sahara desert, it's another ball game to distribute the power to where it's needed without losing it all.

Storing electricity is still the big problem as we have no good solution yet.

Those in favor of wind and solar enegy have a tendency to actively forget about that problem.

So now we have a chap who is storing all the enegy Israel needs in car batteries to run Israel during the night.

I am all for wind and solar energy but this problem with storing electricity remains.

So GO and solve that problem too.

UK used to have huge inflatable tanks for storing coal-gas. You could store electricity by pumping water up into reservoirs during the day and running it through turbines at night.

(Or you could drive electric motors to lift big bins full of sand high in the air and let them drop at night to drive generators. This is if you are in the middle of the Sahara.)

It's really really simple:

electric -> potential -> kinetic -> electric

day time -> night time

Some nay sayers will point out the energy lost in this cycle to friction etc. Really, though, so what? It is a cycle that will work, we know how to do hydro power very well, and it would be cleaner than the current hydrocarbon regime, and, hey, sunlight is free! Over time we would learn how to make it more efficient.

Sometimes it makes sense to just shut up and do it. This is one such case.

Aside form the obvious problems of people trying to steal the copper and other materials associated with the plant -- isn't the world's biggest solar power plant going to be a very obvious target for terrorism?

You can't use extra-thick concrete to cover solar panels as you could a nuclear power station, and the very size would surely mean they would be hard to secure and easy to find?

Personally, I don't believe the "Terrorists will kill us all!!!" hype -- but I'm surprised the Israelis don't.

If you're going to cover 10% of the Sahara in Solar farms I'm assuming that cost is not object, so you don't need storage, you need 5% of the Sahara covered and the remaining surface area can be split over New Mexico and somewhere around the Philippines. Conect them all up with either a Super conductor (which would require <90K temperatures) or a very very long CNT bundle which would act as a Balistic conductor. This way you'd have 24 hour electicity where ever.

(Making the crude approximation that energy requirements of each part of the world are the same...some redistribution of farms might be needed to factor in China).

If that doesn't work treat it like Nuclear and have the excess energy pump water behind a damn and release it when needed. Unfortunately with such a large amount of enery needing to be stored this might cause daily tidal waves.

...how long it would take for a bunch of educated beyond their intelligence greenies to start sniveling about "wrecking the pristine environment" of damned desert and block construction.

Well, if you stop doing anything because of the terrorists, I'd conclude that the terrorists have won.

Hey, Somolia built itself a lovely pharmaceuticals back in the early 90's and a couple of years later the Americans bombed it. AFAIK, the Somolian gov't fixed and carried on. So much for terrorism.

Suppose you're a terrorist. You are standing at the gate of the biggest solar power plant in the world, covering 550,000 square miles. If you can carry 75lb of low yield explosives on your back, how long will it take you to blow up the whole thing? And how will you evade the guys who come looking for the minute power dropoff with each blast you set off? Solar isn't like nuclear. It's distributed. A decently designed plant need not have any major failure points.

If you want to store energy during the day and release it at night (and you have the resources to build 550,000 square miles of solar collector) why not build a bunch of launch loops? Then you get cheap space launches out of the deal too.

10% of the desert..is just a figure.

no one is proposing to supply the worlds power from the sahara.

secondly, sand storms, dust, etc would not significantly effect the glass or voltaics.

thirdly, solar power and wind power WILL most likely power 20% of the world in the next 20 years.

dr johnny

they are referring to 60% efficiency of current technology..which is about 5 to 6%.

60% of 6%...this is the numbers used in their guess-tamation estimate.

10% of the desert is just a figure...solar fields would be spread all over the world where needed.

they are just trying to make a point.... about the size needed to supply the world.

use some common sense folks.

dr johnny

This is how it goes. During the day we electrolise water to generate hydrogen. During the night we use the hydrogen in a fuel cell to genrate power. It is easier to store hydrogen than power in a battery. You can also use the hydrogen as fuel directly. This is all pretty inefficent, but hey! who cares, just cover more of the desert with PV cells, it wasn't doing anything anyway - in fact we might be able to grow mushrooms underneath.

60% of the electricity already comes from Israel, from the plant in Ashkelon. And here's a coincidence - for all the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel, none have come close to the power plant.

As of a scientific press release I read yesterday the current best efficiency of any type of PV is 40,7%, so we are looking at a 30% plus increase on the guesstimate for required area if it never gets any better. Almost certainly it will improve , especially if there is a potential profit in it. As far as locating solar farms elsewhere then you have to factor in the different meteorological conditions for the area you propose, every where is different, the Sahara was probably chosen as an example because it tends to be quite sunny there . Not so much in many other places but mid summer even in the UK can give you nearly 1Kwh/sqM , at 40% efficiency you need a little over 12 square metres to boil the kettle in my kitchen in the 3 minutes it normally takes, however you look at it it is a lot of NASA quality PVs to make the daily tea requirement of the UK .The cost of photovoltaics needs to come down a lot before any of these large scale schemes can be put in place but as solar farming becomes more common place on an industrial scale that should happen. Energy storage is coming on in leaps and bounds with so many different technologies being developed that it will become less and less of a problem. Try googling Large scale energy storage and have a look at a British co called Plurion amongst others. We will get there eventually but don't count on cooking this week's Sunday roast with solar power.

If you covered 90% of the sahara with solar collectors, it would alter the climate of the region. Potentially, there would be no sandstorms anymore.