Planned Solar Farm Would Be Hundreds of Times Bigger Than World's Current Largest

[rasbridge]

 

It would be capable of producing 200 gigawatts of power.

 

By Avery Thompson

 

Apr 4, 2018

 

The world is slowly weaning itself off of fossil fuels, replacing sources of energy like coal and natural gas with cleaner sources like wind and solar. But this process is slow, simply because of the scale of the task. Humans used over 20,000 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2016 alone, and building enough solar plants and wind farms to produce that much energy is a Herculean task. The largest solar plant currently in operation, for example, is the Kamuthi Solar Power Project in India, which generates a mere 550 megawatts of power.

It would take thousands of solar plants of that size to begin outputting enough power to supply even a meaningful fraction of the Earth’s power. But a recent project being considered in Saudi Arabia could change that, by building a solar farm 400 times larger than the Kamuthi installation.

The solar farm in question, the SoftBank Solar Project, is a partnership between the Saudi government and the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, who have just signed a memorandum of understanding. The entire project will cost $200 billion and create 100,000 jobs while generating 200 gigawatts of power.

The cost of the project includes the solar panels themselves, but also includes the cost of battery storage and installation costs. More importantly, the plan also calls for a solar panel manufacturing facility to be constructed nearby, meaning that these and future solar panels can be made much more cheaply.

The 200 gigawatt plant, once completed in 2030, will more than triple Saudi Arabia’s energy production. In addition, it should single-handedly create a strong solar industry in the Middle East. As this project progresses, the infrastructure it creates could enable construction of other solar farms in the region.

 

Source:  https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a19685494/saudi-arabia-plans-to-build-worlds-largest-solar-farm/

[flitox]

and more important they have loads of sun and desert space