One project plans to link the high wind potential of the Tarfaya region with the difference in altitude between the ocean and the sebkha 鹽盤 to produce electric power on demand. The water pumped into the ocean would feed hydraulic turbines before arriving in the sebkha Tah 55 meters below. Part of the energy produced by the wind, when it is available, is used to drive pump driving back to the ocean water stored in the basin.
Developer TuNur this week
applied for authorisation to build a massive solar plant on the edge of the
Tunisian Sahara, with undersea grid connections to Europe
TuNur is proposing a series of concentrated solar plants
like Spain's Gemasolar, here pictured from the historic Solar Impulse
round-the-world flight in July (Pic: Solar Impulse)
There has been talk of tapping into the Sahara desert’s vast
resources of sunshine to power Europe for years, but little to show for
it. The high-profile Desertec initiative, conceived with 19 shareholders and a
budget of €400 billion, flopped撲通落下 amid cost concerns and political instability across
North Africa. Now a massive project in Tunisia is hoping to be the first to make the solar
power export dream a reality. Developer TuNur this week filed a permit request to the energy ministry to build 4.5GW
of capacity near Rjim Maatoug, in the southwest of the country. The electricity generated is destined for Europe, with cables under the sea
to Malta, Italy and France. If all goes smoothly, TuNur chief executive Kevin Sara told Climate
Home a first 250MW phase, with a connection to Malta, could be running
by 2020, for an estimated €1.6 billion investment.
The business case rests on Tunisia’s bountiful sunshine – up to 20% more than
the best sites in Europe, according to TuNur – and vast area of uncultivated
land. EU climate and clean energy goals create demand. TuNur plans to use concentrated solar power technology, which works by
reflecting the sun’s rays onto a central tower from an array of mirrors. Using
molten salt to store the energy, it can flex 顯示力量 generation to meet variable demand.
The initial 250MW plant would already be one of the largest
thermal solar facilities on earth.
(Source: TuNur)
If fully realised, the development would cover 25,000 hectares, nearly
three times the area of Manhattan. “There is so much land, which is completely
marginal land – it is not good enough for agriculture,” said Sara. “It is just
sitting there and the local people are delighted that we are coming to do
something with it.” In 2014, Tunisia became the third country in the world to ink
climate protection into its constitution. That was followed by a renewable energy law in 2015. Political hurdles remain. TuNur lobbied hard to get provision for exports
included in the clean energy legislation, against resistance from the state
electricity monopoly. This is its first test case. The Tunisian energy ministry did not respond to an emailed request for
comment. “This was really the will of the parliament that the renewable energy export
industry be opened up,” said Sara. “We are cautiously optimistic.”
The TuNur project is 50% owned by UK-based company Nur Energie and 50% owned
by investors from Tunisia and Malta. Some north Africans are wary of the whole enterprise. In a 2015
critique of the Desertec initiative published in the New Internationalist,
Algerian activist Hamza Hamouchene accused its proponents of
neo-colonialism. “The Sahara is described as a vast empty land, sparsely populated;
constituting a golden opportunity to provide Europe with electricity so it can
continue its extravagant consumerist lifestyle and profligate 肆意揮霍energy
consumption,” he wrote. “This is the same language used by colonial powers to justify
their civilizing missionand, as an African myself, I cannot
help but be very suspicious of such megaprojects and their ‘well-intentioned’
motives that are often sugar-coating brutal exploitation and sheer robbery.” The TuNur export project was being discussed while Tunisians faced power
outages 停電 and relied on neighbouring Algeria for energy, he added. But Sara said people in the region were supportive of the project. Indeed, he
argued building a solar industry would help redress the inequality between
Tunisia’s wealthy coastal cities and underdeveloped interior. “What we want
to do is really create a [solar export] sector and other people to follow
us.” A press release announcing the application to the government
cites Mohamed Larbi Ben Said, chair of the management board for El Ghrib
Collective, which owns the land. “This project provides the economic
development necessary for our region and our community; it gives true value to
quasi-desert lands in an environmentally sustainable way,” he said. TuNur was associated with the Desertec Industrial Initiative, but Sara
expressed confidence in avoiding its fate: “What we found [with Desertec]
was a big consortium of companies looking for business opportunities, but no
plan, no projects. That was the problem. We have always been focused on a very
specific project on a specific site.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk — whose company makes electric cars and has a new solar roof panel division
— reminded more than 30 state governors at the National Governors
Association meeting this weekend exactly how much real-estate is needed
to make sure America can run totally on solar energy.
“If
you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it
would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only
need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire
United States,” Musk said during his keynote conversation on Saturday at
the event in Rhode Island. “The batteries you need to store the energy,
so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile.”
It’s
“a little square on the U.S. map, and then there’s a little pixel 像素 inside there, and that’s the size of the battery park that you need to
support that. Real tiny.”
Musk laid out his vision for renewable energy that
relies on capturing power from the sun via solar panels — Musk would
probably prefer the solar panels are made by Tesla — to fill the enormous demand for energy in the areas of transportation, electricity, and heating.
1. Combine Rooftop Solar Panels and Utility-Sized Solar Plants
Musk
sees the solar future for America as a combination of rooftop solar —
the panels on a house in the suburbs — and utility-scale solar that can
make up needs in other areas. Recently, Tesla confirmed it would build a
massive solar-powered battery to help power-starved South Australia.
The Tesla Powerpack setup is seen in this company rendering.
Musk
would likely want to see the Tesla Powerpack — its utility-scale
product that uses fields of solar panels and dozens of car-sized
batteries — used.
2. Use Other Power Sources During the Transition
“We’ll
need to be a combination of utility-scale solar and rooftop solar,
combined with wind, geothermal, hydro, probably some nuclear for a
while, in order to transition to a sustainable situation,” Musk
explained on Saturday.
3. Build Infrastructure and Localize Power
Localized power — aka (abbreviation for also known as) solar panels on a roof — is important because it reduces infrastructure, like big power lines.
“People do not like transmission lines going through their neighborhood. They really don’t like that, and I agree,” Musk said.
“Rooftop
solar, utility solar; that’s really going to be a solution from the
physics standpoint,” he said. “I can really see another way to really do
it.”
Why solar energy over other methods of
power generation? Musk says humans have been relying on the sun for as
long as there have been humans, basically. It’s worked up to now.
The sun powers all this anyway.
“The
Earth is almost entirely solar-powered today, in the sense that the sun
is the only thing that keeps us from being at the temperature of cosmic
background radiation, which is 3 degrees above absolute-zero,” he said.
“If it wasn’t for the sun, we’d be a frozen, dark ice ball. The amount
of energy that reaches us from the sun is tremendous. It’s the 99
percent-plus of all energy that Earth has.”
After all, the sun’s a mind-bogglingly big energy ball, anyway: “People talk about fusion
and all that, but the sun is a giant fusion reactor in the sky. It’s
really reliable. It comes up every day. If it doesn’t, we’ve got bigger
problems.”
Going on Solar Means Going Off Fossil Fuels
South
Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard asked why exactly Musk thinks electric
cars have a future in the face of very low gasoline prices. (Musk
envisions Tesla’s vehicles running off power captured by solar panels
that recharge a car’s battery. It all goes back to the sun for him.)
After saying “there’s no question whatsoever that all transport — with the ironic exception of rockets
— will go fully electric,” Musk explained the “big challenge” for
electric cars competing with gasoline-powered vehicles: Essentially, it
boils down to the fact that pollution from gasoline-powered vehicles has
a huge impact on literally everything, except, crucially, the price of
gas.
“There’s an unpriced externality in the
cost of fossil fuels,” Musk said. “The unpriced externality is the
probability-weighted harm of changing the chemical constituency of the
atmosphere and oceans. Since it is not captured in the price of
gasoline, it does not drive the right behavior. It’d be like if tossing
out garbage was just free, and there was no penalty, and you could do it
as much as you want. The streets would be full of garbage. We’ve
regulated a lot of other things, like sulfur emissions and nitrous oxide
emissions; it’s done a lot of good on that front.”
Surprisingly, Musk said he does feel some pity for
big oil, in that when those companies were founded more than 100 years
ago, there was very little indication that their logos would be seen as
villainous a few generations later.
“They worked
really hard to create those companies,” Musk said. “They feel like they
are being attacked on moral grounds. And it is true that we cannot
instantaneously change to a sustainable situation.”
He
added one caveat 警告 預告,, though: “But then those guys will also fight pretty
hard to slow down the change, and that’s really what I think is morally
wrong.”
