The sun is a great source of clean energy, and we have it in abundance, so it’s no surprise that many are proposing a plan to create a huge solar farm in the Sahara Desert, the largest in the world – but while the premise looks promising, it looks like it might not be that simple and positive after all.

The Sahara Desert solar farm is not good?

According to a report by Inverse, researchers have found evidence that only a certain percentage of the sun’s heat is turned into reusable energy and the rest is returned to our environment as heat, which helps raise the temperature of the sun. Earth and contributes to global warming. .

This is something many of us did not expect at all and is what we try to avoid by using clean, reusable energy sources such as sunlight.

Deserts seemed like the perfect space for solar plants, especially since they are abundant in sunlight, wide and spacious, relatively flat, and rich in silicon, a raw material used in the creation of semiconductors for solar panels.

The panels used to collect heat from the sun have dark surfaces that help absorb the sunlight that reaches them, but only a fraction of them is converted into energy, according to The Conversation.

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Affect the global climate

Since the panels are much darker than the ground in their surroundings, a vast expanse of solar cells will absorb more energy and emit it as heat, which would then affect our climate, creating a huge solar farm in the desert of Sahara.

To meet the demand for fossil energy, solar power plants would have to cover thousands of square kilometers.

Although it is possible to cover the Sahara Desert or other deserts in the world, the heat re-emitted from such an area would be redistributed by the airflow in the atmosphere and could have regional or even global effects on our climate.

One of the effects of such a massive solar farm is the possibility of turning the Sahara into a habitable oasis.

In a 2018 study published in the scientific journal “Science” by Yan Li and other researchers, a climate model shows that if a solar farm covers 20% of the entire Sahara Desert, it would trigger a feedback loop, causing more monsoon rain to the region, which could create a wetter environment and spread vegetation to the once barren land.

Negative effects based on the climate model

It may sound good, but a recent study published in the American Geophysical Union (AGU) suggests that such a scenario could have unprecedented effects on remote parts of the land and ocean, which could outweigh any benefit. on the desert.

Among the effects, the drought in the Amazon, considered the lung of the Earth.

There could also be more tropical cyclones on the coasts of East Asia and North America, and Saharan dust, which is blown by the wind to the Atlantic Ocean and the Amazon and serves vital source of nutrients, would disappear.

A massive solar farm could help meet the demand for energy, but it could also cause a significant change in the global climate.

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Written by: Nhx Tingson

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