- Sand/Dirt
- Excess Heat
- Transmission losses
- Political instability
- Geopolitics (Algeria, other issues..)
Arguments for:
- Gets around NIMBY
- ???
Panels need to be clean and cool (25c) to work optimally. Preferably close to where the energy is consumed.
Incidentally the interiors of many sunny EU countries like Spain are depopulated..
And it's not so much "NIMBY" as a genuine land cost issue. We could do well to expand rooftop solar on large buildings, though.
In extreme heat they are 25% less efficient.
Transmission over long distances is not lossless.
The hitch is the people that can make such cables have a long back order list.
Keeping them clean is maintenance. All forms of generation have maintenance requirements.
What is the cost of extra panels to overcome transimission losses? How does that compare to buying fuel at a more local plant?
How much does keeping solar panels clean cost? How does that compare to keeping a gas turbine running?
And yet home energy demand peaks in the winter, for heating (mostly natural gas, but we probably need to move off that) - just when rooftop solar is at its worst.
Putting the same solar panels nearer the equator would produce power with less seasonality - and more total power too.
Is your solar capacity and storage maxed out? How much would it cost to max it out?
Is there a difference in practice between dependence on foreign gas vs foreign solar? Hint: you can store a lot of gas in case of supply disruption and immediately buy more from alternative suppliers. Whereas one UHV cable cut and you are left with no recourse for quite some time.
Is Morocco a stable country? Per chance does it have any disputes with aggressive neighbors?
Moon, however, needs wireless, and I still need to write up that blog post about what I don't like about space based energy…
If Morocco were too unstable for partnerships of this kind, the world would have been fucked already.
Ultimately the biggest argument for is as usual: price. You can make this nearly as available and definitely less expensive than the ongoing European nuclear power projects, except maybe for that power plant in Belarus.
Afghanistan is sitting on a couple trillion in minerals but you aren't getting that out reliably any time soon.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1278057/export-value-fer...
Or maybe it's the same effect as with the Schengen expansion: all the troublemakers moved west.
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-phosphorus-disruptedwe-sleepwa...
https://www.eetimes.com/innovative-approaches-tackle-self-cl...