Morocco Unveils Massive Solar Power Plant In The Sahara

Megalith

Megalith

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Even if you don’t know a thing about solar technologies, you can probably appreciate the level of symmetry that went into this.

The Noor I power plant is located near the town of Ouarzazate, on the edge of the Sahara. It's capable of generating up to 160 megawatts of power and covers thousands of acres of desert, making the first stage alone one of the world's biggest solar thermal power plants. When the next two phases, Noor II and Noor III, are finished, the plant will be the single largest solar power production facility in the world.
 
Large solar plants in the desert makes sense, since the land isn't otherwise really usable for anything, and those regions tend not to have a developed energy grid.

The biggest problem with solar, even in the desert though, is that its an unreliable power source so you need to be able to store that energy so that you can always use it on demand.

Doing some research, it looks like molten salt is their half-ass solution to this problem as its only good for 3-hours of power storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_solar_power_station
The plant will be able to store solar energy in the form of heated molten salt, allowing for production of electricity into the night. Noor 1 comes with a full-load molten salt storage capacity of 3 hours.
Click to expand...
 
160 megawatts of power is relatively speaking, a small power plant.
 
the planet surface is starting to look like a motherboard or cpu to a point. got to really squint you're eyes
 
I wonder if the area gets frequent sandstorms which might harm the surfaces of the mirrors?
 
Ducman69 said:
Large solar plants in the desert makes sense, since the land isn't otherwise really usable for anything, and those regions tend not to have a developed energy grid.

The biggest problem with solar, even in the desert though, is that its an unreliable power source so you need to be able to store that energy so that you can always use it on demand.

Doing some research, it looks like molten salt is their half-ass solution to this problem as its only good for 3-hours of power storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_solar_power_station
Click to expand...

LOL Doing some research? How about reading the article?
 
I wonder how many endangered birds this will kill every month?

This is such a problem with the smaller solar plants out here in the California desert, that they where given a special exemption. Any other business would be facing millions in fines for killing even a fraction of the birds killed by these solar plants.

Same with windmills, They also kill a lot of birds, but they also get an exemption.

Kind of gives new meaning to the saying "Green is the new Red"
 
How does solar plants kill birds again? I know I read it before, but I forget....

that set of arrays look pretty sick.
 
Ducman69 said:
Large solar plants in the desert makes sense, since the land isn't otherwise really usable for anything, and those regions tend not to have a developed energy grid.

The biggest problem with solar, even in the desert though, is that its an unreliable power source so you need to be able to store that energy so that you can always use it on demand.

Doing some research, it looks like molten salt is their half-ass solution to this problem as its only good for 3-hours of power storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_solar_power_station
Click to expand...

"Noor 1 comes with a full-load molten salt storage capacity of 3 hours."

So if energy usage is not high (like at night) it will last longer.
 
pothb said:
How does solar plants kill birds again? I know I read it before, but I forget....

that set of arrays look pretty sick.
Click to expand...

Not all solar installations kill birds.
If the solar panels are the type that absorb sunlight no birds are hurt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel

If the power plant is the type that is a set of mirrors that reflect the sun up to a centralized place (storage container of molten salt) if birds fly by the area the sun is being reflected/too close to the container they will be burned to death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#Grid_integration

For those who are not aware the later type of solar generation - using molten salt - is ideal as it will continue to generate power even when the sun is not shining/at night at roughly 99% efficiency. OC it doesn't last forever (about 40 hours w/o sun) before it requires re-heating
 
Ducman69 said:
Doing some research, it looks like molten salt is their half-ass solution to this problem as its only good for 3-hours of power storage
Click to expand...

This is only one example. Other locations can generate heat from the salt for as much as 40 hours.

In the long run, it will take a smarter electric grid with micro and macro energy storage. In no way can current liquid-based batteries do this. If a solid state battery is ever developed or lithium-air comes to fruition in the near term those will be options. Other means of energy storage are available now though. Pressurized air, Flywheels and water pumps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity) are some examples

Here's a good list of all ways to store energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage

Renewable energy does not mean that our standard of living will decrease.
Renewable energy does require all of us to reconsider how we manage our electricity.
 
It's capable of generating up to 160 megawatts of power and covers thousands of acres of desert, making the first stage alone one of the world's biggest solar thermal power plants.
Click to expand...
I know my sense of scale is probably out of kilter, but that picture they show does not look like thousands of acres. 1000 acres would be more than 1 mile by 1 mile, and using that road as a point of reference (unless it's one super wide road) does not look that big. Maybe the entire property is thousands of acres, but the solar part is a very small fraction of it.
 
What I'd like to see is a substantial drop in prices for solar panels for the homeowner.
Small units, on a national if not global scale could do a great deal to reduce the demand for more powerplants. Sor of a distributed power generating infrastructure.
I, for one, would love to reduce my monthly electricity bill, especially in the summer where the AC runs most of the day in the S-E of the US. In this case, storage wouldn't be so much of a concern, since it would generate the most power when it is needed the most.
I would love to be able to sell my excess generated solar power to the grid operators, like a very small number of pilot project households do, but for now the simple idea to reduce my power consumption dependence would be good enough.
 
nutzo said:
This is such a problem with the smaller solar plants out here in the California desert, that they where given a special exemption. Any other business would be facing millions in fines for killing even a fraction of the birds killed by these solar plants.

Same with windmills, They also kill a lot of birds, but they also get an exemption.

Kind of gives new meaning to the saying "Green is the new Red"
Click to expand...

Always find it funny when someone gets up in arms about the relative few birds that are killed by windmills in comparison to the billions that are killed because we build big fucking buildings with windows for them to run into and the cat is one of the most popular pets for people to have. But oh no... lets keep trashing wind energy, rabble rabble rabble, liberals!
 
aShrubbery! said:
What I'd like to see is a substantial drop in prices for solar panels for the homeowner.
Click to expand...
The Chinese saw fit to make sure that never would happen, I think there was that one place Nanosolar (or something to that extent, they always use high tech names as their company name) were working on thin film printed solar panels and were aiming at $1/watt cost to consumer but ultimately there was a huge price drop in solar panels because Chinese manufacturers colluded to sell the panels below the cost to make them and ultimately put them out of business, granted they eventually got caught for it, and "fined" but the damage was already done.
 
that folks is the one of MANY issues with solar it takes up MASSIVE space in even the best places for it
 
Ducman69 said:
Large solar plants in the desert makes sense, since the land isn't otherwise really usable for anything, and those regions tend not to have a developed energy grid.

The biggest problem with solar, even in the desert though, is that its an unreliable power source so you need to be able to store that energy so that you can always use it on demand.

Doing some research, it looks like molten salt is their half-ass solution to this problem as its only good for 3-hours of power storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_solar_power_station
Click to expand...

and if you going to do molten salt you might as well go nuclear as well with it since you have 90% of the same issues to start with
 
travisty said:
Renewable energy does not mean that our standard of living will decrease.
Renewable energy does require all of us to reconsider how we manage our electricity.
Click to expand...

yes it does

unless we go 100% nuclear

population growth will easily out strip efficacy
 
swimming pool said:
LOL Doing some research? How about reading the article?
Click to expand...

Yeah this station is not the ordinary solar setup granted and is perfect for the area. However, many of the more usual ones are useless and owe their existence mainly to the huge tax subsidies given to build them.

Here in the UK we get greenies saying we should dump all nuclear and fossil fuel energy for wind and solar.

Only they forget that for every MW of power solar and wind provide we have to have equal backup in nuclear and fossil for when it doesn't.

This January on one day in the evening, peak power usage for the UK hit 52,000MW. Wind and solar was only putting in 55MW across the country.

Just doesnt work as a small island nation. We need to be at least 65% Nuclear and 25% fossil. At best renewables will only ever deliver at best 10% for us.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Always find it funny when someone gets up in arms about the relative few birds that are killed by windmills in comparison to the billions that are killed because we build big fucking buildings with windows for them to run into and the cat is one of the most popular pets for people to have. But oh no... lets keep trashing wind energy, rabble rabble rabble, liberals!
Click to expand...

Quite frankly cats should be banned as pets. They are a serious eco disaster.
 
daglesj said:
Quite frankly cats should be banned as pets. They are a serious eco disaster.
Click to expand...
Banned as outdoor pets in at-risk areas, not banned as pets. Indoor cats tend to have a diet mostly of chicken, and perhaps the random insect that wanders into the house.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Always find it funny when someone gets up in arms about the relative few birds that are killed by windmills in comparison to the billions that are killed because we build big fucking buildings with windows for them to run into and the cat is one of the most popular pets for people to have. But oh no... lets keep trashing wind energy, rabble rabble rabble, liberals!
Click to expand...

Try thinking for just one second about it. Buildings are something stationery that birds can go around. For the most part. Further most birds are not moving fast enough and are not massive enough for them to do more harm to themselves running into a window than surprising the hell out of them. There's a reason you never see piles of dead birds around tall buildings.

Versus something like solar that gives no warning you are flying into a mirror-based deathray beam until you are in it...or windmills that especially bats have issues with.


Our problem is that high-capacity power plants like anything nuclear have basically been made uneconomical for any corporate entity to ever want to go to the effort of building. Our problem also is that the USA is becoming uninhabitable in the summer without air-conditioning, or that we as a society are a bunch of weenies that can no longer tolerate heat.
 
With all that potential power generation it'll be a damned shame considering how much transmission loss there'll be in the process of getting it from the point of generation to wherever they'd like to make use of it, probably 30-50% loss which is quite a chunk considering.
 
daglesj said:
Quite frankly cats should be banned as pets. They are a serious eco disaster.
Click to expand...

By that line of thinking, humanity should be at the top of that list 'cause we've fucked this planet up more than all other species combined (and we're still going).
 
Tiberian said:
By that line of thinking, humanity should be at the top of that list 'cause we've fucked this planet up more than all other species combined (and we're still going).
Click to expand...

Well unlike humans cat can't choose to mitigate their impact.
We of course are not doing enough... will probably screw ourselves slowly.
Aside about birds...
Funny I used to see: bluejays, cardinals, mockingbird, weird black birds, weird green birds, weird tricolor birds ( yeah I don't know birds). Guess what I see or hear now? Zero birds, yet theres zero windmills.. There are several now-feral cats through. Now if the cats were producing clean energy.. I might be less inclined to complain.
I guess we need to increase the wind power by 10000 to match what the bird kiling machines that are cats do.
 
Skripka said:
Try thinking for just one second about it. Buildings are something stationery that birds can go around. For the most part. Further most birds are not moving fast enough and are not massive enough for them to do more harm to themselves running into a window than surprising the hell out of them. There's a reason you never see piles of dead birds around tall buildings.

Versus something like solar that gives no warning you are flying into a mirror-based deathray beam until you are in it...or windmills that especially bats have issues with.
Click to expand...
Say what you want, buildings easily kill a billion birds every year, simply due to the fact that they don't look like objects that are stationary to them. Yes there are many reasons you never see piles of dead birds around tall buildings, where people congregate you tend have some form of cleaning, especially when it comes to dead animals so that they don't pile up, around a wind mill where you might get someone checking up on it every few months, you tend to let nature do the removal.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Say what you want, buildings easily kill a billion birds every year, simply due to the fact that they don't look like objects that are stationary to them. Yes there are many reasons you never see piles of dead birds around tall buildings, where people congregate you tend have some form of cleaning, especially when it comes to dead animals so that they don't pile up, around a wind mill where you might get someone checking up on it every few months, you tend to let nature do the removal.
Click to expand...

Funny....I work in a tall building and know the maintenance folks by name. They're never cleaning up bird carcasses.

You too can say what you want.
 
Meanwhile the smallest nuclear plant in America (built in the late 60's) takes up 700 acres and puts out 484 megawatts.

And that's an ancient reactor. The new breeder reactors are far more efficient and have almost none of the risks of the old reactors (cannot have a run-away meltdown and very very little left over waste).

But hey, lets be eco-friendly, yay!
 
westrock2000 said:
Meanwhile the smallest nuclear plant in America (built in the late 60's) takes up 700 acres and puts out 484 megawatts.

And that's an ancient reactor. The new breeder reactors are far more efficient and have almost none of the risks of the old reactors (cannot have a run-away meltdown and very very little left over waste).

But hey, lets be eco-friendly, yay!
Click to expand...
Fukushima yeah! Nuclear as developed in the pressure cooker style is the second most stupid development by humanity.
The first being a-bombs... Funny how the reactor desings are the children of the bomb making. 2 moronic choices in one! Molten salt was the way to go if we are to play with radioactive poison.. But bombs!!
 
Uvaman2 said:
Fukushima yeah! Nuclear as developed in the pressure cooker style is the second most stupid development by humanity.
The first being a-bombs... Funny how the reactor desings are the children of the bomb making. 2 moronic choices in one! Molten salt was the way to go if we are to play with radioactive poison.. But bombs!!
Click to expand...

Had the water not flooded the plant, it would have been fine. Building a nuclear power plant in a flood plane is a dumb idea (and it has been done many times).

And again those are all old designs. we have learned from them and made MUCH safer reactors, however due to government regulations and smear campaigns, no one is allowed to build these newer reactors.

Also, *because* of a-bombs, this planet has been fairly peaceful for nearly 60 years. That's a good amount of time for no "super powers" of the world to be fighting each other. MAD has definitely worked.
 
westrock2000 said:
Had the water not flooded the plant, it would have been fine. Building a nuclear power plant in a flood plane is a dumb idea (and it has been done many times).

And again those are all old designs. we have learned from them and made MUCH safer reactors, however due to government regulations and smear campaigns, no one is allowed to build these newer reactors.

Also, *because* of a-bombs, this planet has been fairly peaceful for nearly 60 years. That's a good amount of time for no "super powers" of the world to be fighting each other. MAD has definitely worked.
Click to expand...


Tell that to everyone not living in the USA...Russia and the former Soviet bloc is bankrupt and seems headed to go back to dictatorship with unsecure nuclear materials and weapons everywhere...MAD meant that in place of open war inside the borders of the superpowers---all that conflict moved to border "proxy wars". All the "proxy war" countries both open and secretive are hellholes to this day.

-Why do we have a drug cartel problem in the USA from Latin and South America? Because the USA in the 50s destroyed all the governments that took the place of Banana Republics the USA created....we funded death squads to prevent commies from coming back...the=ose death squads went into "business" as drug kingpins

-Why is Iran the way it is? Better dead than Red USA foreign policy.

-Why is Iraq how it is? Better dead than Red USA foreign policy.

-How about Afghanistan? Better dead than Red USA foreign policy.

-The Koreas? Better dead than Red USA foreign policy.

.
.
.

And so on. To say "MAD worked", is to ignore or be ignorant of 60+ years of USA foreign policy. And it is all coming home to roost-why is it that a random ISIL nut in Africa can buy an AK47 for $20USD and shoot up a hotel and be a martyr? Because of MAD and the "proxy wars" it birthed.
 
Skripka said:
Tell that to everyone not living in the USA...Russia and the former Soviet bloc is bankrupt and seems headed to go back to dictatorship with unsecure nuclear materials and weapons everywhere...MAD meant that in place of open war inside the borders of the superpowers---all that conflict moved to border "proxy wars". All the "proxy war" countries both open and secretive are hellholes to this day.

-Why do we have a drug cartel problem in the USA from Latin and South America? Because the USA in the 50s destroyed all the governments that took the place of Banana Republics the USA created....we funded death squads to prevent commies from coming back...the=ose death squads went into "business" as drug kingpins

-Why is Iran the way it is? Better dead than Red USA foreign policy.

-Why is Iraq how it is? Better dead than Red USA foreign policy.

-How about Afghanistan? Better dead than Red USA foreign policy.

-The Koreas? Better dead than Red USA foreign policy.

.
.
.

And so on. To say "MAD worked", is to ignore or be ignorant of 60+ years of USA foreign policy. And it is all coming home to roost-why is it that a random ISIL nut in Africa can buy an AK47 for $20USD and shoot up a hotel and be a martyr? Because of MAD and the "proxy wars" it birthed.
Click to expand...

No, that's the price of empire. You don't seriously think everything would be hunky-dory if the Soviets had been allowed to run roughshod over all of Eurasia, do you?
 
aeliusg said:
No, that's the price of empire. You don't seriously think everything would be hunky-dory if the Soviets had been allowed to run roughshod over all of Eurasia, do you?
Click to expand...

We'll never know. All the saber rattling and penis-measuring of cold-war only did one thing for certain...egg the other guy into doing more outrageous crap.

It did make Boeing, General Electric, Lockheed, and a few other companies a hell of a lot of money. It also left us with our modern problem of having half-a-dozen overlapping branches of military service all with their own duplicative bureaucracy, all with their own duplicative and overlapping capability, and all with their own money drain.
 
Cold War literally killed the USSR. All without having the lines move an inch in Europe. If that's not a total strategic victory, I don't know what is. Would you really rather have had a conventional war topped off with a nuclear showdown in the heart of Western civilization rather than in some mountains and jungles? The world is a messy place, but this universe we're in turned out as well as it could have. I count my blessings instead of lamenting any lost economic efficiencies.
 
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