This blog posting represents the views of the author, David Fosberry. Those opinions may change over time. They do not constitute an expert legal or financial opinion.

If you have comments on this blog posting, please email me .

The Opinion Blog is organised by threads, so each post is identified by a thread number ("Major" index) and a post number ("Minor" index). If you want to view the index of blogs, click here to download it as an Excel spreadsheet.

Click here to see the whole Opinion Blog.

To view, save, share or refer to a particular blog post, use the link in that post (below/right, where it says "Show only this post").

Bad Journalism about Solar Power Generation in the Sahara.

Posted on 5th March 2021

Show only this post
Show all posts in this thread (Bad Journalism).

Another piece of bad science journalism appeared on "The Next Web" recently (here).

The report describes how massive solar energy farms in the Sahara would cause less energy to be reflected back into space, and thus cause local heating, adding significantly to global warming (although it would have a positive effect on the local climate in the Sahara, with the local heating increasing rainfall).

Tunisia Planned Solar Energy Farm

The article talks clearly about large farms of photoelectric panels, which do indeed reflect less energy than the sand of the desert. Sadly for the journalist, although luckily for the planet, the solar energy farms currently planned for the Sahara are not huge arrays of photoelectric cells, but are based on arrays of mirrors (which track the position of the sun in the sky) which focus sunlight on centrally positioned boilers to generate electricity, as in the artist's impression to the right, which is of the planned installation in Tunisia. The albedo (reflectivity) of such a solar energy farm is very similar to natural desert sand, and maybe even a little higher. There would therefore be little or no local heating from such a facility.

That is not to say that there shouldn't be thorough environmental impact studies for such solar energy farms in the desert, but there seems no cause for panic.