What If We Covered the Sahara With Solar Panels?

this video is made possible by brilliant learn something new every day for 20 off by being one of the first 200 people to sign up at brilliant.org real life lore more energy will fall on the world's deserts in six hours than the entire world will consume over the next year the sahara desert is well known for being the world's largest hot desert but it's probably a lot bigger than you even realize it's nearly the same size as china it spans across 10 different countries in three different time zones and it gets absolutely massacred by sunlight this is a map that shows annual sunshine hours across the world there are some notable hot spots in north america south america and southern africa but nowhere gets as much as the sahara desert most of this china-sized chunk of land gets more than 3 600 hours of sunlight a year and within that big chunk is this other chunk that gets more than 4 000 hours a year for reference that's nearly four times the amount of annual sunlight that germany gets most of this is because the sahara desert is a pretty much directly along the tropic of cancer which means the sun for a lot of the year is pretty much directly over it and b clouds pretty much never form or even exist over the entire desert which means all that sunlight is never interrupted the sahara consequently is the best location anywhere on earth to place solar panels and develop solar farms so it then begs the question what if we covered the entire desert with solar panels how much energy would we actually be able to produce and how would this change our planet let's take a deep dive for starters let's begin here this is the where's that solar power station in morocco the world's largest concentrated solar power plant currently in existence in a marvel of modern engineering once fully completed and operational the plant will take up an area of 25 square kilometers and be capable of producing 582mb of electricity it will even be capable of storing solar energy in the form of superheated molten salt which allows for further production of electricity even into the night after investing more than 9 billion dollars into their solar energy objective morocco aims to create four additional plants similar to this one in the sahara that will collectively create more than 2 000 megawatts of electricity production which will be enough to provide for roughly 38 of all of morocco's annual electricity needs this project will transform morocco into the world's leading solar energy state and as the only african country that currently has a power cable linked to europe much of this energy will be exported for profit to the countries of the european union but all of this energy is created from just five relatively small plants what happens when we scale things up a bit and think bigger one of the few organizations thinking about sahara solar energy production in the future is the german energy company desertec which happens to be an investor of the moroccan solar energy project according to their research and data taken from the german aerospace center a solar panel array of just this small size in the sahara could power 100 of germany's entire electricity needs an array of this size could power the entire european union while an array of just this size could power the entire world's modern electricity needs at approximately 18 trillion watts give or take a bit considering that a typical solar panel generates roughly 350 watts of power this earth-powering array would encompass around 51.4 billion solar panels and it would be roughly the same size as the u.s state of new mexico quite a large amount of land but it's nothing when compared with the vastness of the sahara that also happens to be incredibly sparsely populated only about two and a half million people live across the sahara which means that its population density is on a par with siberia which further means that it's possible to set up huge solar farms like this without too much of a negative impact on the local inhabitants the desert tech project doesn't quite intend on transforming the entire sahara into a solar farm but it's still quite ambitious the general idea is to set up a series of massive solar farms across the sahara's perimeter and deeper into the middle east once constructed this collection of solar farms will provide for the majority of africa's and the middle east electricity needs while shipping any excess power across cables to europe that could supply as much as 15 of the continent's entire electricity needs this is a real-life plan that's undergone significant amounts of research and investment but why are they only planning on building solar farms around the sahara's perimeter well while there's lots of obvious benefits to constructing solar farms in the empty sahara there's also lots of problems first of all the sahara's emptiness itself is both a blessing and a curse on the one hand it means that almost nobody will have to be relocated or moved off of their land but on the other hand there isn't any infrastructure to actually get the massive amounts of supplies into place in any kind of cost effective manner i mean look at this map there's only like four roads that even stretch across the sahara from the north to the south there are huge empty pockets of land across the desert without a single road at all and some of these areas like this northwestern pocket of chad are more than 600 kilometers away from the nearest road transporting billions of solar panels to a remote area like this will necessitate building countless new expensive highways or railroads to get them there and that's why desert tech is only planning on constructing plants around the sahara but let's forget all of that for a moment and just think about the cost of the solar panels themselves in a sahara sized array a pretty average 350 watt solar panel typically costs anywhere between 200 and 450 once fully installed on a residential roof today since we know that it's going to be expensive transporting and installing all of them in the middle of one of the world's most remote locations we're gonna stick with a high cost estimate here and tack on an additional 300 for delivery in infrastructure fees and 250 more dollars for installation fees conveniently this math makes the total cost for each 350 watt panel exactly one thousand dollars so from there you can figure out pretty quickly that the 51.4 billion solar panels needed to fit inside of our new mexico sized array that'll power the entire planet will cost a cool 51.4 trillion us dollars for reference that's approximately 60 percent of the entire world's gdp but it would enable us to immediately switch all of our electricity over to renewable solar so that's pretty cool all right then now let's just assume that we've turned on infinite money and we expanded upon this by filling up the entire sahara desert with solar panels what is going to happen now well for starters if we assume that the solar panels are 100 efficient the entire sahara desert will probably now be producing somewhere around the neighborhood of 1.3 million terawatt hours of electricity per year so to put that number into perspective the entire contemporary human species consumed about 173 000 terawatt hours of energy in 2019 and that's not just electricity that's all energy consumed for everything we did that year a sahara desert covered in solar panels would generate more than seven times the amount of energy that all of the nearly eight billion humans of the world collectively consume right now obviously this would present revolutionary changes to what mankind could be capable of and not just even closer to a type 1 kardashev style civilization but this overwhelming power given to humanity by harnessing the entire sahara would also come with some significant costs the black surfaces of the solar panels dotting the sahara will of course absorb most of the sunlight hitting the sahara only a tiny fraction of that incoming energy will actually be converted into electricity while the overwhelming majority will be returned back to the environment as heat in turn this heat will trigger a sort of feedback loop in which the heat emitted by the solar panels would create a steep temperature differential between the land and the surrounding oceans this will ultimately lower the surface air pressure and cause moist air to rise and condense into clouds and rain across the desert so by covering the entire sahara with solar panels will also unwittingly be terraforming the desert sahara into a green sahara at the same time in some ways this will be good because it will open up a massive amount of land the size of china to colonization human settlement and critically for the emerging economies of north africa extensive economic development for their countries and their people but in other ways this will be really bad the amazon rainforest over in south america is extensively fed and fertilized by dust coming over from the sahara that gets blown across the atlantic while the atlantic ecosystems themselves also benefit from this fertile dust as well removing all of the sands of the sahara desert could create a cascade of unforeseen events that could wipe out entire ecosystems in the atlantic the amazon and probably beyond and create an epic climate catastrophe the likes we have never seen before in summary covering the entire sahara with solar panels would be epic but it's also not feasible it's probably pretty dangerous and it's not even necessary either we only need solar panels covering the area of new mexico to meet all 8 billion humans modern electricity needs and they don't even need to be all in the same place they can be spread out across all of the world's deserts or anywhere where it's sunny and hopefully by the end of the century we'll have made some pretty decent progress here now maybe you're sitting here wondering how solar panels and solar energy actually work in order to help myself better understand that very thing for this video i took the full solar energy course that's offered on brilliant maybe you're interested in the very same thing or maybe you just want to brush up on the basics of math and logic or maybe you just want to learn more about how our world works so what should you do well you're already watching educational videos here on youtube which is a great start but in order to really learn something you've got to actually do it and that's where brilliant will come in to help brilliant is a website and app built off of this exact principle you learn the best while doing and solving in real time you can jump directly into solving problems and be coached bit by bit until before you even realize it you've learned a new subject in stem let's take this lesson they offer on the pythagorean theorem as an example you may remember from school what the formula is but in this lesson you're moving around triangles and actually proving that a squared plus b squared is equal to c squared every lesson you take on brilliant is as interactive and as easy to understand as this one and it scales all the way up from here to complex topics that you never imagined you would actually understand you won't ever be asked to memorize long complicated formulas or endless facts you just pick a course that you're interested in like solar energy or computer science and just get started and if you're feeling stuck or you make a mistake you can simply read the explanations to find out more and learn at your own pace the best part about brilliant though is that there's something there for everybody whether you want to start at the basics of science math or computer science or dive straight into cutting edge topics like differential equations or neural networks i always struggled with learning complicated stem subjects while i was in school because it was so easy for me to get overwhelmed by a huge wall of information that was difficult for me to ever focus on but now brilliant has helped me so much with learning about all of these things that i used to think were just a lost cause and they helped me make videos like the one you just watched so if you'd like to join me in the community of 8 million other learners and educators today you can get started on anything from astrophysics to algebra 2 for 20 off by being one of the first 200 people who go to brilliant.org real life lore or by following the link down in the description and as always thank you so much for watching

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 8,579,229

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, sahara, sahara desert, solar, solar power, solar panels sahara, sahara solar panels, sahara solar

Id: 62ASvupr8Zg

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021