Morocco poised to become a solar superpower with launch of desert mega-project

[packman]

The power station on the edge of the Saharan desert will be the size of the country’s capital city by the time it is finished in 2018, and provide electricity for 1.1 million people.

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Noor 1, the first section at the town of Ouarzazate, provides 160 megawatts (MW) of the ultimate 580MW capacity, helping Morocco to save hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions per year.

At around 2pm, the king will press a button, the parabolic mirrors will start turning, the heat will begin to turn the turbines and the plant will come to life,” said Maha el-Kadiri, a spokeswoman for Masen, Morocco’s renewable energy agency. "

You know, it's a shame America doesn't have vast unpopulated areas that get a lot of sunshine each day so we could do something like this.


http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/04/morocco-to-switch-on-first-phase-of-worlds-largest-solar-plant?CMP=twt_gu

[lonestarnot]

1. Cool. Too bad we are so stupid.

[EX500rider]

6. Are we?

That produces 160 megawatts...

As of the fourth quarter of 2014, the U.S. has 18.3 gigawatts of installed photovoltaic capacity.
The U.S. is among the top countries in the world in electricity generated by the Sun and several of the world's largest utility-scale installations are located in the desert Southwest.
A total of 4,324 MW of utility scale solar power plants are under construction and an additional 25,926 MW are under development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_States

[mahatmakanejeeves]

8. I have to agree.

"Noor 1, the first section at the town of Ouarzazate, provides 160 megawatts (MW) of the ultimate 580MW capacity,..."

580 MW isn't a whole lot of power. The Potomac River Generating Station, a coal-fired plant on the north end of Alexandria, Virginia, that closed a few years back, generated either 482, 514, or 540 MW, depending on which source I look at.





Potomac River Generating Station

Big wind turbines put out about 7 MW.



Prototype of the Siemens offshore SWT-7.0-154 wind turbine

The big six-axle locomotives at the front of long freight trains are rated at 4,400 horsepower, or 3 MW.



General Electric ES44DC locomotive

[Deuce]

2. Thumbs up to Morocco!

[DirkGently]

3. Yes. Why not us? This is the kind of substantive discussion we could

be having.

[Baitball Blogger]

4. Oh noes! They're sucking all the solar energy out of the atmosphere!

[lonestarnot]

10. Sun gona die, we all gona die.

[Wounded Bear]

5. Not so sure I want huge solar farms....

that's the corporate solution. I'd prefer banks of solar cells on every house in the country. Distributed generation is the way to go.

Big generation facilities and the networks of power lines that distribute the power are more terrorist targets than benefits to society.

[packman]

7. Good point

I wouldn't be adverse to making it a federal mandate that for ANY new construction - be it any gov. building, or any house that is having a gov. backed mortgage - have some sort of solar cells either for energy or hot water/air.

[Wounded Bear]

9. Hell, if we could get local generation to a point...

where say 90% of houses/buildings were generating 10-25% of power locally, it would take enormous load off of the grid. It might be hard to get some houses up due to space, as in total roof area, but it's a worthy goal.

I'm not sure I'm into a mandate just yet, but subsidies and credits would be great.

Another thing we should probably do is shift houses and appliances to DC power. You can't store AC and inverters are inherently not very efficient. Then local batteries could store energy for overnight. You still need AC for distance over the grid and all, but there is not reason that single small buildings couldn't be run on DC.

[GreatGazoo]

11. Morocco will have no monopoly on solar power but they WILL have one on

Phosporus.

Morocco, it is thought, holds up to 85 percent (PDF) of the globe's known phosphate rock reserve—and a lot of it lies in Western Sahara. Morocco's royal family thus controls what Jeremy Grantham, cofounder of the prominent Boston-based global investment firm Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co., called the "most important quasi-monopoly in economic history."

Who cares about phosphorus? For starters, every living thing on Earth—including humans—since all the crops we eat depend on it to produce healthy cells. Until the mid-20th century, farmers maintained phosphorus levels in soil by composting plant waste or spreading phosphorus-rich manure. Then new mining and refining techniques gave rise to the modern phosphorus fertilizer industry—and farmers, particularly in the rich temperate zones of Europe and North America, quickly became hooked on quick, cheap, and easy phosphorus. Now the rest of the world is scrambling to catch up, and annual phosphorus demand is rising nearly twice as fast as the population.
...
But the scarier reason is that, like any mined material, phosphate rock is a finite resource, and there's fierce debate about just how long our supply can last. "Peak phosphorus" doesn't get a lot of buzz, but it should. In a recent essay in Nature, Grantham, who also runs an environmental foundation, put the case bluntly: Our P use "must be drastically reduced in the next 20-40 years or we will begin to starve."

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/05/fertilizer-peak-phosphorus-shortage

[KamaAina]

12. We do, and we are

but the megaprojects in the Mojave Desert come with environmental issues of their own.

[Fla Dem]

13. Wonder about this. Particularity the large wind turbine farms.

Can huge field like this affect wind currents? And of course they are dangerous for flying birds. I'm all for getting away from fossil fuels, but is there a down side?