The Sahara Is Expanding, Can A Giant Solar Farm Help?

The world's largest desert, the Sahara, is growing and has been for at least a hundred years. It's a happening that seems improbable to end. Yet, this ever-expanding dilemma hasn't stopped at least one group of scientists from dreaming of a way to do it. And their proposed solution, a grand scheme that includes covering vast areas of desert with solar panels and windmills, just got published in the prestigious journal Science.

Eugenia Kalnay, a noticeable atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland, has been thinking approximately this idea for a decade. Kalnay is small in stature, soft-spoken. But she's made her name with big and bold plans. And what could be bigger and bolder than modifying the course of the world's biggest desert?

Describing The Cycle

Her scholarly adviser at MIT, Jule Charney, was among the first to describe the vicious cycle that can lead to desertification. With the drought, green vegetation disappears, and the light-colored dirt that remains reflects more of the sun. This cools the land surface, which in turn suggests that there's less heat driving air upward into higher and cooler levels of the atmosphere – the process that normally produces precipitation. So there's less rain, destroying even more vegetation.

Kalnay wondered if there may be a way to revive those atmospheric flows. "It occurred to me that the same [cycle] would go in the opposite way, so it would increase rainfall, and vegetation, and then more precipitation," she says.

And then she gathered her thoughts of solar panels. They're opaque, so they don't reflect the sun's light. Could they heat up the exterior and revive those rain-bringing air currents?

Convincing Can Produce Results

Kalnay convinced one of her post-doc researchers to produce a computer simulation of an otherworldly Sahara where 20 percent of the land is covered with solar panels. The computer design also turned the desert into a giant wind farm, covered with turbines. Kalnay believed they might also help boost those beneficial air currents.

And the simulation turned out just the way she'd expected. It showed rainfall progressing by enough to bring back vegetation. The model showed the most significant increases in rainfall along the southern edge of the Sahara, the region called the Sahel.

"It is wonderful!" she remarks, and her eyes go wide with an infectious joy. "We were so happy because it seems like a superior solution for some of the problems that we have."

The super solar farm she pictures is huge, as big as the entire United States. And it would create four times as much electricity as the entire planet consumes right now. Kalmay parleys of novel high-capacity transmission lines delivering energy to Europe and the rest of Africa.  That would be a historic amount of power flowing from the sun to lands everywhere!

I told her that the whole scenario seems like science fiction. Kalnay disagreed. "It would be science fiction if the technology was not feasible," she replied.

"So you could dream it?" "Yes," she said, positively. After all, she's used to visualizing the workings of the entire planet's atmosphere. Several billion solar panels and windmills in the desert? No big thing.

Many investors have explored the possibility of large solar farms in the Sahara, though nowhere near as massive as the scenario that Kalnay has simulated. Those plans, however, remain stuck on drawing boards.

It's clear that solar panels can help people in many ways, and if you are ready to receive the benefits they possess, inquire today with HahaSmart!  We can help you find some great prices on solar today.

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