Archives from month » November, 2009

Largest Solar Project Planned

1 Comment

Thanks to Scientific American, our last post concerned the world’s eleven largest renewable energy projects.

I just learned about a much even bigger one still in the planning phase. There’s a nice post about the plans over at the Inhabitat Blog. The New York Times covered it last week too.

Go read those posts, but here are a few highlights:

  • The Berlin-based Desertec Foundation is heading up the plans.
  • The “largest solar project” distinction refers to the entire proposal, not to any single site. The concept includes multiple solar farms throughout northern Africa.
  • It will be 10-15 years before the project comes online.
  • As proposed, the project would supply 15% of Europe’s energy demands. (Really? 15% of ALL energy demands, or just 15% of electricity demands? I haven’t fact-checked yet, but both blog posts use this figure.)
  • The technology is to be concentrating solar power. (Does anybody know of a nice source that compares the cost, efficiency, benefits and drawbacks of concentrating solar power vs. other forms of solar energy collection such as photovoltaic cells?)
  • The project seems to have plenty of detractors: Those who fear that Europe will invest less in domestic solar power, that it will have difficulty negotiating with the north African nations in question, and those who worry that sandstorms and political instability could wreck the proposed solar farms.

Energy Series in Scientific American

2 Comments

Scientific American is building a huge collection of articles, posts, and slide shows on energy at http://www.scientificamerican.com/energy. (Does anybody know when they established this section?) If you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth keeping an eye on. You can sign up for weekly e-updates on energy from them too.

One of the latest additions is a slide show on the world’s ten (well, actually 11) largest renewable energy projects. Onshore wind, offshore wind, photovoltaic, hydroelectric… and also Portugal’s very weird new wave power plant. So the article covers the 11 biggest projects all around the world, and the author was fairly thorough in letting us know how much energy each facility produces.

Picking the largest facilities seems like an interesting device… but I’d also like to know the relative impact of these few giant projects, compared to the cumulative output of smaller ones.