Solar Panels Sahara Desert

In just six hours the world s deserts receive more solar energy than the entire human race consumes in a year.

Solar panels sahara desert.

Ok now here s the cool part. The annual electricity production reaches 1 300 000 twh at maximum in this sun drenched area if the whole desert is covered in solar panels. The statistics are mind boggling. A solar power plant on the edge of the sahara with the capacity to produce 160 megawatts was completed in 2016 wind and solar power plants in sahara could turn desert green.

It wouldn t be easy though. The saharan sun is powerful enough to provide earth with significant solar energy. That square in libya is 1 18th of the land area of the sahara. And if it were covered in solar it would make enough power for all of europe and northern africa.

Global horizontal irradiation a measure of how much solar power received per year. Given the sahara covers about 9m km that means the total energy available that is if every inch of the desert soaked up every drop of the sun s energy is more than 22 billion. Covering a patch of north africa s sahara desert in solar panels could provide an abundance of clean renewable energy for the world a new analysis argues. If the desert were a country it would be fifth biggest in the world it s larger than brazil and slightly smaller than china and the us.

In a world exhausted of fossil fuels solar panels can provide a sustainable solution to our energy problems. Four experts discuss the radical proposal with the bbc world service inquiry programme. If we covered just 1 2 percent of the sahara desert in solar panels we could harness enough of this power to meet the energy needs of the entire world. Solar panels could have remarkable impact on the desert though installing mass amounts of solar panels in the sahara could also have a remarkable impact on the desert itself.

The weather features of the sahara desert especially the insolation have a pronounced nature. But they also come with a couple of issues.