Desert Solar Power Drawbacks
Posted on February 17th 2010
For most people in the world the concept of utilizing the sun’s rays for cheap, renewable energy is a big plus. In order to fully utilize this most people tend to look first to one of the most plentiful places on the Earth for sun – the deserts – and wonder why we haven’t developed solar power generating sources on those regions more in order to supply countries with a more regular and readily available energy product. When looking at this route, however, there are a few big drawbacks as to why this has not been implemented.
The largest drawback currently when looking at implementing any solar power production facility is purely cost. Although technology has progressed somewhat steadily over the past few years in order to drop the overall cost of solar cells substantially the establishment of a large-scale, durable solar energy power plant in desert regions is still much higher than comparable alternatives – including simply sticking with fossil fuels for the time being. While costs may drop in the future to allow more widespread production and application of solar energy across the globe for the time being the financial limitations are deterring most major developments from being established in any of the world’s deserts.
The second major drawback for solar power in desert situations lies in the fact that photovoltaic cells (common solar cells) become less and less efficient the hotter they become. This means that a solar cell that could normally operate at 30% efficiency in cooler climates – a very good energy conversion rate – may operate at 10% or less efficiency in a hotter climate. Since deserts tend to have the hottest temperatures in the planet in order to fully maximize solar cell efficiency a secondary cooling system would need to be implemented in order to constantly cool down the cells as they operate – meaning only higher development and maintenance costs in both the short and long run for solar power plant developers.
Fortunately there are a number of groups looking into these issues and attempting to develop sustainable solar power generation facilities around the world at this time, including Desertec – a European cooperation of engineers and developers who are focusing on establishing productive solar generation spots primarily in Africa and the Middle East. They speculate that if they could successfully utilize just 1% of the world’s desert surface for solar power production then they could produce the same amount of energy from that small of an area of land that the world currently uses and allow for a full conversion from current fossil fuels and our dependence upon them.
Unfortunately at the current state of both technological and economic development the idea of developing sustainable solar generation in the near future is not likely, though if current development trends continue it could potentially be feasible in a decade or two. The only major competitor at this point for the solar power industry is the wind turbine industry that can currently provide higher energy conversion rates and more feasible implementation prospects in the immediate rather than far future, though this may naturally change once technology has developed further to support solar production.
There now solar cells with lower drop in efficiency with temperature. The concentrated solar thermal is becoming very affordable and will become the best solution for desert conditions with fairly high efficiency.
Instead of keeping all the Power Generation at one place a distributed generation world wide with wind and solar will solve the problem of low plant factor and the solar energy being available only when there is sun. Linking all the countries with transmission links will make the wold grid and will help the intermittent nature of wind power.
Soon these will happen and the Coal and Oil prices are going up while the cost of wind and solar generation are coming down.
There are several unknown subsidy for coal gas and oil and if these are diverted to renewable we will have less pollution from Power generation from renewable.
We will look forward for these less polluting renewable with generation from the deserts in different parts of the world
Kanaga, I’m not sure I understand you. What do you mean when you say that “coal and oil prices are going up while the cost of wind and solar generation are coming down”?
A good point about the operational efficiency degrading as temperature of the cell rises, at least for the present generation of cells. The point about cost is slowly changing, but with peak power producing times of 20% to 25% of the day, even in the deserts, that is going to be a large hurdle. Another point not mentioned concerns the glass used either for protection of the cell or as an integral part of thin film cells. There is not, at this time, sufficient production capacity in the US to make enough glass to satisfy the requirements if a large fraction of the electricity is to come from solar, even if no cars or buildings or houses were supplied with glass.