Could the desert sun power the world?Green electricity generated by Sahara solar panels is being hailed as a solution to the climate change crisis

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• Morocco to host first solar farm in €400bn renewables network


Leo Hickman guardian.co.uk, Sunday 11 December 2011 20.30 GMT

During the summer of 1913, in a field just south of Cairo on the eastern bank of the Nile, an American engineer called Frank Shuman stood before a gathering of Egypt's colonial elite, including the British consul-general Lord Kitchener, and switched on his new invention. Gallons of water soon spilled from a pump, saturating the soil by his feet. Behind him stood row upon row of curved mirrors held aloft on metal cradles, each directed towards the fierce sun overhead. As the sun's rays hit the mirrors, they were reflected towards a thin glass pipe containing water. The now super-heated water turned to steam, resulting in enough pressure to drive the pumps used to irrigate the surrounding fields where Egypt's lucrative cotton crop was grown. It was an invention, claimed Shuman, which could help Egypt become far less reliant on the coal being imported at great expense from Britain's mines.

"The human race must finally utilise direct sun power or revert to barbarism," wrote Shuman in a letter to Scientific American magazine the following year. But the outbreak of the first world war just a few months later abruptly ended his dream and his solar troughs were soon broken up for scrap, with the metal being used for the war effort. Barbarism, it seemed, had prevailed.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/11/sahara-solar-panels-green-elec...

the only problem with PV solar panels is that they get less efficient the hotter they get.

I'm involved with a company that wanted to rent roof space to create solar farms in the cities, mostly industrial areas.
the only thing that has stopped the project going ahead is the design of the panels, as beening roof mounted they get too hot to be efficient enough for large scale energy production that is profitable (without subsidies), this apparantly is the same for the ground based systems.
the business is still a go if we can come up with a better panel for this application.

Small scale installs don't suffer to the same degree as the large scale systems.

the way forward is thermal solar for large scale energy production. over the next decade there are a few of these systems coming online.
but the industry needs to be able to perform at a non subsidized level for the real investment to start to kick in, and for the industry to be seen as a real player in the energy market.