[LINK] "The 2 Ingredients for Self-Replicating Solar Power: Sahara Sand & Sun"

[rfmcdonald]

The idea of unleashing Von Neumann machines on the Sahara Desert does seem to have obvious failure modes, but it's such fun!

Using two resources that the Sahara has plenty of, sun and sand, the Sahara Solar Breeder Project hopes to build factories that will refine the sand’s silica into silicon. That silicon will be used to build solar panels, which will power more silica-refining and solar panel factories, which will be able to build more solar panels, and on and on and on.

The potential for exponential growth allows for some extreme optimism: The project’s leaders say they could build enough power stations to meet half of the world’s energy needs by 2050. Project leader Hideomi Koinuma believes the project is key to solving the world’s energy crisis, saying:

“If we can use desert sand to make a substance that provides energy, this will be the key to solving the energy problem. This is probably doable. Moreover, the energy we continually receive from the Sun is 10,000 times the energy currently used by mankind. So if we can utilize 0.01% of it skillfully, we won’t have a shortage of energy, but a surplus.” [DigInfo TV]

The Sahara desert is about the size of the United States, but instead of being full of people and farms and towns the Sahara is almost empty of everything. Everything except sand, that is. Three and a half million square miles of it.

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Though Koinuma is bursting with enthusiasm, desert sand has never been used to produce silicon-based solar panels before, so the team will have to perfect that technology first. Once they start building factories, they’ll have to cope with environmental hazards in the desert like sandstorms and shifting dunes.

If all of those endeavors are successful, the energy produced by the station will still need to be transferred from the desert to areas that need it, which requires superconducting power lines kept cold by liquid nitrogen–a technology which is difficult to handle in the best of circumstances, let alone in the middle of the empty desert. Koinuma believes the superconducting lines would be cost-effective, though another company called the Desertec Foundation is working on the same problem with a different approach.