What if we Covered the Sahara in Solar Panels?

What if we covered the Sahara with solar panels? Well, they’d take up 9.2 million square kilometers. An area larger than the US. They’d generate 4.6 million terawatt hours of electricity. 150 times global demand. They’d decarbonize global energy. Create millions of jobs in North Africa. And raise local temperatures, pulling in moist air from the Atlantic that would rain down, terraforming the Sahara into a green paradise. But it would cost 280 trillion dollars, and need millions of kilometers of transmission lines and billions in batteries to store energy during the night. It would also be located in a politically unstable region, require billions of liters of water and millions of robots to keep it clean and would block dust from cooling the Atlantic ocean and fertilizing the Amazon rainforest, leading to worse hurricanes and an ecological disaster.

#sahara #solarpanels #whatif #future #africa #solarpower #megaproject