From Ace of Spades HQ.
“Researchers imagine it might be possible to
transform the world’s largest desert, the Sahara, into a giant solar farm,
capable of meeting four times the world’s current energy demand. Blueprints
have been drawn up for projects in Tunisia and Morocco that would supply
electricity for millions of households in Europe.
“While
the black surfaces of solar panels absorb most of the sunlight that reaches
them, only a fraction (around 15%) of that incoming energy gets converted to
electricity. The rest is returned to the environment as heat. The panels are
usually much darker than the ground they cover, so a vast expanse of solar
cells will absorb a lot of additional energy and emit it as heat, affecting the
climate.
“If these
effects were only local, they might not matter in a sparsely populated and
barren desert. But the scale of the installations that would be needed to make
a dent in the world’s fossil energy demand would be vast, covering thousands of
square kilometers. Heat re-emitted from an area this size will be redistributed
by the flow of air in the atmosphere, having regional and even global effects
on the climate.”
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