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The Sahara & Arab Desert as Energy Sources (was: Mars and the Sahara)



 
 
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Old September 7th 06, 12:27 AM posted to sci.space.moderated
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Default The Sahara & Arab Desert as Energy Sources (was: Mars and the Sahara)

The Sahara & Arab Desert as Energy Sources (was: Mars and the Sahara)

Dated July 19, 2006 from sci.space.moderated

Mars and the Sahara
http://federation.g3z.com/FedSeries/...ricaLetter.htm

wrote:
To the couple replying on topic. Yes, China, itself, has indeed begun
to take on the task of terraforming the Gobi desert; the UN has made
reclamation of desolate areas the major issue of this year. The novel
element advanced here is the linking to the (now-active) fields of
extraterrestial agriculture, to agricultural robotics, and the issuing
of the Sahara, itself, as the natural proving grounds for people,
countries, agencies, (even competitions) throughout the world to come
into to test, experiment with, and develop anew the needed technologies
to first reclaim the desolate regions of this Earth -- particularly
with Global Warming now ramping up, to ultimately break the back of
this syndrome as a result -- and ultimately shortly thereafter, the
once-waterbourne planet of Mars whose history shares a lot in commmon
with the Sahara.

There are in fact entire books written on the topic of reclamation (and
an even larger number of references that can be found by even the most
cursory web-search); but the prospect of tying the two together
(reclamation and terraformation) is still novel.


Current technology enables solar collectors to operate at around 33% of
theoretical maximum efficiency which, if I correctly recall would be
100 watts per square meter, leading to an input of about 33 watts per
square meter.

Newer technology is being developed based on "quantum dots" which has
proven the ability to bring this up to 65%, or about 65 watts per
square meter.

The major advantage of the Sahara, in its present condition, is that it
is bone dry without a single cloud in the sky virtually anywhere at any
time and an extremely high intensity of sunlight year-round.

It is also huge -- upwards of 9 million square kilometers.

At the most extreme -- every single square meter covered in solar cells
-- this would amount to 300 trillion watts (600 with the newer
technology) over a period of about 12 hours a day, 10 counting the
effects of the lower intensity at dawn and dusk, for a total of about
3,000,000 gigawatt-hours per day!

With more advanced technology that total moves up to 6,000,000.

The world energy consumption, as of the early '00's decade is on the
order of about 400 quadrillion BTU's a year, a BTU being about 1000
watt-seconds; which means about 400 quintillion watt-seconds a year, or
about 120 million gigawatt-hours a year. Daily consumption is about
300,000 gigawatt-hours.

Balanced against the theoretical maximum, the potential of the Sahara
is about 20 times the current energy consumption of the entire planet.

So, it is not too difficult to see that there should be plenty of power
to drive the engines of industry to systematically run entire swaths of
the oceans through purification, as well as running virtually
everything else -- everywhere else (even on the entire planet, if need
be).

The land space required to match the world energy consumption is about
450,000 km^2 or somewhere around 250-300 thousand square miles. A much
smaller landspace is required to supply the power to drive the
reclamation process.

Solar, of course, is not the only means to collect power --
particularly for the purification process. The constant sunlight also
provides a means to drive large evaporation pools to this end, for
instance.

Now, the idea of the letter was that technology developed for
reclaiming desolate regions of the Earth should be scalable for
application elsewhere -- that is, on Mars, since the idea is that the
development on-world should serve as the proving grounds for
development off-world.

The setting of Mars has a lot in common with the Sahara, ranging from
its former history of being a waterbourne space, to its current
desert-like terrain and virtually cloudless days (and dust storms on a
few days, like the Sahara). The major problem, of course, is the solar
intensity dropping off to around 25-30 watts per square meter, using
the inverse square relation.

But there's a lot more landspace to exploit.

 




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