Comments by "" (@zachrodan7543) on "What If We Covered the Sahara With Solar Panels?" video.

  1. two key problems with the idea of even just the new mexico sized solar farm (the farm that could provide all the electricity currently used by the entire world), which are not, at least directly, about money: 1. wind and sandstorms. while there are basically no clouds in the sahara, there is wind, and there are sandstorms which could absolutely bury any solar panels. 2. connecting: while you could absolutely build power cables to send this electricity to europe, africa, and asia, there might be some difficulties getting it to any part of the world not connected by land to the source, such as australia and the americas. the engineering involved with getting the generated power across significant bodies of water could cause some serious issues. and then there are some places which would likely pose additional engineering challenges, such as hawaii. the main advantage of fossil fuels over other energy sources is that they are easy to transport away from the source. and then extract the energy closer to where you need it. this could also theoretically be done with nuclear power, but probably shouldn't be, for obvious reasons. meanwhile, for solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and other such renewable energy sources, you need to convert it to electricity or some sort of storage at the location where you harvest it. perhaps a sort of battery ship could be used to transport this power to the rest of the world, but that would depend on having a good way of efficiently loading and unloading said power, and minimizing losses. I wonder what would be the most effecient way of getting electricity generated by solar panels in the sahara to someplace like hawaii. some ideas: battery ships (would probably first need to be designed and built, but I wonder how quickly you could then transfer the stored power off of the ship, so as not to leave the boat stuck in the port longer than necessary. might require some serious infrastructure developments) power cables (might have problems with resistance at such lengths) lasers and fiber-optic cables, paired with some sort of photocell generator (no clue what the efficiency of power transfer would be with this, if it is even possible...)
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