The sand and remoteness makes installation and maintenance difficult.
Heat is hard on electronics.
At a huge enough scale, it would lower the albedo of the (normally very reflective) desert, heating up the local environment.
Transmission. This is the biggest factor. Transmitting tons of power a long way is tremendously difficult, dangerous, slow to build, expensive, and unavoidably inefficient.
On top of that, you’d want to buffer power (with batteries) or keep spare capacity (like gas generators) near the source to regulate the supply. This is less of an issue at smaller scales, where solar ‘blends’ into the grid.
Producing the things. It’s easy to say ‘just make more’, but you’d need to massively scale up every section of production: the mining, the transportation of the ore, the transportation of the panels, the production of the machines to fabricate the things, educating people to make those machines, all in a frayed global supply chain.
Countries might feel uncomfortable being so dependent on each other for energy. Yes, the irony is tremendous.
It’s not impossible. There are installations in the Atacama Desert (for instance), which is basically the best case scenario (ridiculously dry, high altitude), but you’d run into problems scaling it up to, say, power all of Brazil.
There are reasons power generation tends to be more localized. Adapting it to the local environment, a la carte, is kinda the way to go.
For point 3, I assumed solar doesn’t get as hot since it turns the light into electricity. Due to the conservation of energy and mass, it must reduce some of the heat by turning it into electricity, right?
Maybe solar is mostly tapping into the energy from the light, not heat? If LED lights are so much more efficient because they don’t generate heat, then that untapped heat must be a lot of potential energy we could use for the grid, right?
At best, you’re looking at 30% for the most expensive experimental cells, minus other efficiency losses like dust or transportation.
…In practice, deployed panels will be less efficient than that. And I think that number excludes radiation frequencies outside the panel’s absorption range, yet hitting the panels anyway.
What I’m getting at is the sheer ‘darkness’ of the panels blows out the effect of converting such a small fraction of that radiation to electricity. In aggregate, far more heat is absorbed by a field of panels than light sand.
That’s not catastrophic. It’s not a contributor to global warming on the scale of greenhouse gasses or anything (and don’t let Big Oil tell you otherwise), but it is a slight concern for the local environment, and possibly a cost factor.
Solar panels use photons to create electricity, not converting infrared heat to energy. So the heating really isn’t a factor in the energy created. Sure, we could place a crapload of thermopile/TEG’s on a solar panel to soak up the heat and turn it into electricity, but they’re expensive and inefficient.
Others summed these points up quite nicely, but:
The sand and remoteness makes installation and maintenance difficult.
Heat is hard on electronics.
At a huge enough scale, it would lower the albedo of the (normally very reflective) desert, heating up the local environment.
Transmission. This is the biggest factor. Transmitting tons of power a long way is tremendously difficult, dangerous, slow to build, expensive, and unavoidably inefficient.
On top of that, you’d want to buffer power (with batteries) or keep spare capacity (like gas generators) near the source to regulate the supply. This is less of an issue at smaller scales, where solar ‘blends’ into the grid.
Producing the things. It’s easy to say ‘just make more’, but you’d need to massively scale up every section of production: the mining, the transportation of the ore, the transportation of the panels, the production of the machines to fabricate the things, educating people to make those machines, all in a frayed global supply chain.
Countries might feel uncomfortable being so dependent on each other for energy. Yes, the irony is tremendous.
It’s not impossible. There are installations in the Atacama Desert (for instance), which is basically the best case scenario (ridiculously dry, high altitude), but you’d run into problems scaling it up to, say, power all of Brazil.
There are reasons power generation tends to be more localized. Adapting it to the local environment, a la carte, is kinda the way to go.
For point 3, I assumed solar doesn’t get as hot since it turns the light into electricity. Due to the conservation of energy and mass, it must reduce some of the heat by turning it into electricity, right?
Maybe solar is mostly tapping into the energy from the light, not heat? If LED lights are so much more efficient because they don’t generate heat, then that untapped heat must be a lot of potential energy we could use for the grid, right?
I have no idea what I’m talking about lol
This is true to an extent, but the raw conversion efficiency is not that high:
https://www.nrel.gov/pv/interactive-cell-efficiency
At best, you’re looking at 30% for the most expensive experimental cells, minus other efficiency losses like dust or transportation.
…In practice, deployed panels will be less efficient than that. And I think that number excludes radiation frequencies outside the panel’s absorption range, yet hitting the panels anyway.
What I’m getting at is the sheer ‘darkness’ of the panels blows out the effect of converting such a small fraction of that radiation to electricity. In aggregate, far more heat is absorbed by a field of panels than light sand.
That’s not catastrophic. It’s not a contributor to global warming on the scale of greenhouse gasses or anything (and don’t let Big Oil tell you otherwise), but it is a slight concern for the local environment, and possibly a cost factor.
Solar panels use photons to create electricity, not converting infrared heat to energy. So the heating really isn’t a factor in the energy created. Sure, we could place a crapload of thermopile/TEG’s on a solar panel to soak up the heat and turn it into electricity, but they’re expensive and inefficient.