Summary:
Lack of sunshine or wind close to energy demand locations is a key limitation on the viability of renewable energy at scale. However, with enhancing battery technology, electricity could be moved by ship and train, like oil and gas is currently, enabling deserts to power the world with solar energy and averting the threat of climate change.
Policy:
The global threat of climate change requires a rapid decarbonisation of the worldwide economy. While electric cars promise a major reduction in emissions, they also require massive increases in the size of electricity grids to provide power.
Many countries will struggle to deliver such massive grids with renewable energy due to their lack of sunlight or wind and space for renewable energy power plants.
There are large swathes of the world where reliable solar could be generated, but at the moment there is deemed to be no way of moving that power to demand countries efficiently and cost-effectively, since power lines involve too many losses over long distances.
With the enhancement of battery technology, however, we should no longer need to rely on power lines to move electricity but instead move it as we do oil and gas; in long trains of petrol tankers and in massive ships.
I therefore propose a two-fold policy to enable a massive increase in renewable electricity.
The first stage is to create massive solar power plants in the deserts of the world. Due to the shortage of rare earth minerals needed for photovoltaic cells, these plants should use concentrated solar heat to power steam turbines.
These solar power plants could be hundreds of square kilometres in size with very little environmental impact, as they would be in arid desert areas (a worldwide geographic analysis would need to be conducted to identify suitable locations, including analysis of water availability for cooling and proximity to train lines or oceans/seas to enable power distribution).
To move the electricity around the world to high-demand countries such as the UK, the second stage wood involve laying power cables onto off-shore terminals where oil tankers that had been converted to massive battery ships would charge up.
Those ships would then sail to their destinations, anchor offshore (by staying offshore, the boats can be much larger and therefore carry more power than if they have to dock at port) and feed their stored power onto the grid. Once they were almost empty, they would set sail back to the desert solar plant to refuel.
As they would be carrying so much battery power, they would all be converted to running on electricity, massively reducing the cost of shipping fuel and also reducing emissions.
In countries such as Australia with large electricity demand and deserts, battery trains would operate to take power to cities and then sit in large goods yards storing power until it was needed, then releasing it to the grid and returning to the desert to recharge. Those countries would also have offshore terminals to export excess power abroad.
Given that battery storage will be a key component of future clean energy grids anyway, these battery boats and trains would provide a dual role; both moving energy as is currently done with oil, meaning a country with no sun or wind could be powered by the sun and wind somewhere else in the globe, and also providing storage to allow for flexibility in domestic energy production.
The ability to move coal, oil and gas from its source location anywhere in the world to be used as fuel was key to driving the economic growth of the past two centuries, but it also caused climate change.
We now have the opportunity to use the same approach of moving energy from one location to another that proved so successful, but to do so in a way that averts the threat of climate change, cleans our air, and provides cheap and reliable power to spur clean economic growth for the next two hundred years and beyond.
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