Can Mirrors Light Up The World?
According to the Guardian, two recent reports state that vast solar farms in North Africa’s deserts using simple mirror technology could be a great source of free energy.
Covering just 0.5% of the world’s hot deserts with a technology called concentrated solar power (CSP) would provide the world’s entire electricity needs, with the technology also providing desalinated water to desert regions as a valuable byproduct, as well as air conditioning for nearby cities.
It continues…
Europe should build a new high-voltage direct current electricity grid to allow the easy, efficient transport of electricity from a variety of alternative sources. Britain could put in wind power, Norway hydro, and central Europe biomass and geo-thermal. Together the region could provide all its electricity needs by 2050 with barely any fossil fuels and no nuclear power. This would allow a 70% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production over the period.
This CSP business, however, is not new. There has been a plant in the Californian Mojave desert for years, while others are currently being developed in Nevada, Spain and Australia. There are different forms of CSP but all share in common the use of mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on something containing a gas or liquid which is heated up and used to power conventional steam turbines.
The whole article can be found here.
Photo Credit: SolarSphere/Weizmann Institute of Science
