Gregory's Server@karolherbst @ShadowJonathan Thus I'd say it would be more reasonale to just plaster a [liberated!] #WesternSahara full with #Solarthermal Powerplants and covert that energy into Methanol...
|
5 comments
 @empressEvora @karolherbst @ShadowJonathan depends... One yould do non-moving parabolic mirror (don't need to be polished, simple sheetmetall wil ldo the trick) and just have a slit at the bottom of tue parabolic rail to let the sand fall through... The reason why even then this would work well is because of scaling effects in modern powerplant tech... And with the local abundance of power conversion - even at terrible efficiency - to Hydrogen and Methanol - is feadible. @empressEvora @karolherbst @ShadowJonathan Also no, you can't make offshore wind power that floats, tho there's huge amounts of shoreline wind power zmthat has yet to be tapped into... OFC that could be deployed on virtually any coastline since they tend to be windy enough... Same goes with solartgermal: Deployable in any warm to hot climate... @kkarhan @karolherbst @ShadowJonathan even with parabolic mirrors and gutters you’d still need infrastructure to clean the mirrors. That requires water either through transport or generation. We see this in all current generation solar thermal plants. Also, you most definitely CAN build floating off shore wind generation. In fact there are already 3 floating off shore wind farms. Here is an example one. @empressEvora @karolherbst @ShadowJonathan You can just dimension and gematrically design said mirror gutters to not accumulate much sand if said particles are just flowing away. OFC one shouldn't try to build a solarthermal powerplant on top of shifting dunes - that would be stupid. The majority of desert is rocky tho, so maintenance should be minimal if not lower than photovoltaic panels since those would likely have fine sand sticking to the glass and said glass gets scratched up... |
@kkarhan @karolherbst @ShadowJonathan while a decent idea the environment in the western Sahara is not conducive to large scale solar power due to the large amount of particulate that will dull and wear the mirrors (or PV cells in the case of PV power generation). Any scale large enough for global power supply would need massive amounts of infrastructure to sustain itself let alone transit the stored energy.
The best option for large scale fully renewable power generation is likely going to be free floating off shore wind farms. These could also help power desalination and hydrogen fuel generation on the shore and offer non-centralized generation (safer against attacks or localized disasters) and decreased need for transport (Less transit infrastructure means lower overall impact to environments).
@kkarhan @karolherbst @ShadowJonathan while a decent idea the environment in the western Sahara is not conducive to large scale solar power due to the large amount of particulate that will dull and wear the mirrors (or PV cells in the case of PV power generation). Any scale large enough for global power supply would need massive amounts of infrastructure to sustain itself let alone transit the stored energy.