Data centers and the electrification of devices that previously ran on fossil fuels is driving increased demand for electricity around the world. China is addressing this with a megaproject that is a new spin on their most famous piece of infrastructure.
At 250 miles long and 3 miles wide with a generating capacity of 100 GW, the Great Solar Wall will be able to provide enough energy to power Beijing, although the energy will more likely be used to power industrial operations also present in the Kubuqi Desert. NASA states, “The Kubuqi’s sunny weather, flat terrain, and proximity to industrial centers make it a desirable location for solar power generation.” As an added bonus, previous solar installations in China have shown that they can help combat further desertification by locking dunes in place and providing shade for plants to grow.
Engineers must be having fun with the project as they also designed the Guinness World Record holder for the largest image made of solar panels with the Junma Solar Power Station (it’s the horse in the image above). The Great Solar Wall is expected to be completed by 2030 with 5.4 GW already installed in 2024.
Want to try solar yourself on a slightly smaller scale? How about this solar thermal array inspired by the James Webb Telescope or building a solar-powered plane?
Now only if I can figure out a use for my 120W panel…It was an impulse buy (45$)
A rock tumbler or an evaporation cooler
Blowerassembly for shed or cellar with heating element
I bought two 300 watt panels, then another two more. Then six 400 watt panels. Solar scales quite well.
If I had a single panel left over, I’d look to charge my ebike (once I finish building said ebike, I have the parts!)
Beware. Solar panels are addictive. You get one to play with. Then you get another, to keep that small power bank charged. Then you see a great deal on a bigger power bank, which means you really ought to get another battery. Then you’re doing some work on a new carport and realise that you could plausibly put a couple on the roof. Now you nearly have enough to warrant an inverter, so you look for one of those, but it doesn’t really make sense without a few more panels. Then…
So true. I now put a couple of panels and a micro invertor in electrical jobs “cheap”, as a “gateway drug” to get them hooked. Nek minute, they are installing 10kW of panels, a 6kW invertor and 10kWh of battery. Ka-Ching.
You also shouldn’t mix panels together of different wattage and specs.
Can you use similar panels when one is partly in shade?
I imagine you have those 300W and 400W panels on separate charge controllers?
You only need to run the LED at night. During the day, let the sun take over. Twice the free energy, for free!
“As an added bonus, previous solar installations in China have shown that they can help combat further desertification by locking dunes in place and providing shade for plants to grow.”
But often deserts are very salty as well. Often they are ancient sea beds, and as there often hasn’t been rain for many ages, the salt content is too high for most normal plants. As far as I know, this is one of the reasons why deserts are so persistent. Even if you start watering the deserts, there are not many plants that can live in the soil. It might need another few decades of watering before you can actually reach the point where you have beaten the desert and the land will become self-sustainable.
A desert is not just the result of heat and lack of water. ‘Fixing’ a desert is not ‘just add water and shade, and watch!’.
Some deserts are genuinely “what water there was all ran off instead of staying around”.
“Further desertification” sounds like stopping the (salty?) sand from going further to non-desert areas. Even if very few plants thrive in the shadows, they’ll still help hold down the sand.
Excess sand can be vitrified. It’s cheaper and more pernament than using plants.
in old day this deserts are steppe
Less than a century ago it was for most of it a balanced ecosystem of steppe, rabbit, wolf and human pastoral activity.
Now Shanghai is desiccated by hot winds, dusted by desert sands, and drown by floods, and the whole region is a desert.
If humans can´t keep their ecosystems alive and thriving, they´ll have zero success terraforming Mars. Supposing they even come there in meaningful quantities before ruining they own planet.
“They”? Are you non-human?
Wait, what? Are you saying they will ruin the “ecosystem” of Mars? I think you are over-egging the pudding. Besides, in China it tends not to be “humans” so much as the Party.
“it’s the horse in the image above”
The irony is that image shown of “the Guinness World Record holder for the largest image” as shown on this Hackaday page is so damn small that on my phone it’s hard to see the beast with the naked eye. So you can imagine that for me it was a bit hard to find the record holding image of the horse.
Tip for Hackaday: place an arrow or big red circle in the image which tells us where to look.
Tip for Hackaday: add a banana for scale please
Not exactly easy to see on a 2560×1440 desktop monitor either.
for those of you going “what horse” look dead center and just to the right. It’s not easy to spot.
Next up, landing strip for alien spacecraft. At least the Chinese know what to do with their solar. Others take pot-shots at them (a variant on NIMBY).
Thanks! Also, technically, they drew the horse with a lack of solar panels (as an outline where panels are missing).
Thanks, I see it now! I was looking, rather unimpressed, at a very blocky upside down “horse”.
I’m still looking for it…
OK, switched to a different image from NASA for the header to make the horse more clear. My bad!
OK, that’s a lot horseyier.
Maybe buy a bigger phone?
I had a look at the Kubuqi desert on google earth, and it has older pictures, as soon as you zoom in, the whole solar park disappears, but you can see some flattened desert in preparation.
About 100km to the west there is also already a quite big patch of solar cells, and it’s got some characters resembling test written “in” it.
here https://maps.app.goo.gl/utSvqnpKUC7qmZ1u9 i see a project part with the horse to the right, and another with characters in the corner to the left.
Maybe they don’t like people to zoom to close, because of the disappearance.
I see no horse, but I do see a sailboat
Now if we could only put solar panels in our deserts….Instead of guilting the homeowners of the world into leasing or buying for their homes….What could happen with that.
heck of a lot better than windfarms!
Yeah, guilty of being free from governments and utilities. Even big oil if one drives an EV.
Guilting? My father in law installed them pretty willingly. He is telling me how much he saved regularly. Now he’s also dumping excess power into water to save on gas. Madness. :-)
Yes, but in Maryland they have billboards up wanting more people to take advantage of the “up to $7500” of I assume tax credit for putting panels on your home….
Then while you do the research as you’re about to replace your roof due to storm damage anyway and find out the total costs are north of $30K. And getting any financing to help with that is dodgy.
Then you do the formula to determine what your return on investment will be….Longer than I plan to be in the house it turns out.
So, they run billboards up, they increase the cost of delivery of electricity due to data centers being built, and it’s my fault because I don’t want to do what is best for some rich jerk to get more money while he builds a datacenter but won’t pay for the extra capacity to power them.
So, yeah, guilt.
And I can tell you where they can stick that crap!
That’s why ground mounting solar panels are better
FWIW, I once calculated the size of a solar array needed to power the US, and it turns out to be a square about 20 miles on a side. Depending on assumptions, such as access roads between panels; other estimates I’ve read put it at 40 miles on a side. This is tiny relative to the amount of land we have in the US.
There’s a lot of area in the great basin section of the US that’s currently not used, some of it has already been ecologically ruined by big greenification experiments, and some of it is salt basin leading to the great salt lake and nothing grows there. Basically there are 20 mile stretches between the ridges that are flat, dry, and 200 miles long.
Solar panels supply shade which ultimately leads to water retention, and this would cause the desert to become greener and support more life.
Most of the US highway system has a divided median with guardrails for both lanes, and I’ve always wondered why we couldn’t put solar panels there (between the lanes, or along the sides). Add a modern power line and note that the highways go straight to the nearest city, which is where the power is needed.
You’d need a method of running the power line under bridges (or maybe over) and some other details like adding guard rails and grid-scale storage where needed, but it seems like we have the resources to power the entire country from solar. Not at night, of course, but this would put a big dent in consumption.
When we get our collective heads on straight I think this will be the next big thing, probably over the next 30 years or so.
I think you´re off by A LOT. Show the maths !
I had to do this calculation on a physical chemistry final, and the above result is fairly similar to what I got, although I thought it had to be about 2.5x the above. The US needs about 12 billion KWh continuously. Assume that your typical solar installation is harvesting about 200W per square meter and you’re getting about 165W once you factor in transmission losses.
200W/m2 would be noon on a good sunny day (100w/m2 from the sun, ~20% efficient panel), not the other 12-18 hours of the day though.
The US has to get our collective heads out of our collective asses first.
Solar highways – been there, done that.
For renewable energy footprint/area calcs, https://landartgenerator.org/ has it covered.
Back of the envelope: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php
= 4 trillion kilowatthours (kWh) in 2022
Solar hitting the earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance Nevada looks like about 3,000 kWh / m2 / year. (!)
Solar cells have around 20% efficiency, so let’s call it 600 kWh / m2 / year.
sqrt(4 trillion / 600) = 81.650 km on a side ~= 50 miles. Ballpark math checks out.
(Wow!)
Okay cool theory. The array above is 250 miles on a side and only powers Beijing. Why is that? The ballpark might be miscalibrated..
I’m sure it is. Smellsofbikes above has 165 W / m^2 of solar output net of transmission losses. So that’s a factor of 2.5ish on my estimate.
Why is the Beijing one different? It’s thin. It’s 250 x 3 miles = 750 square miles. 50 x 50 miles is 2,500. And like you say, I may be underestimating the size.
I mean, these are all insanely large solar farms though. All of them.
Updated article to add the 3 mi wide bit too since that was causing some confusion. Thanks!
IMHO, we should have invested in these with TARP moneys returned from the banksters’ death grip. Last I checked “… it earned $441.7 billion on the $426.4 billion invested…”, not sure is the math is off, but even at “…$15.3 billion in profit…” is helluva of basically free money.
IMHO, not just solar panels, offshore wind farms, etc etc. Same Greenpeace “activists” who helped bureaucrats destroy our nuclear power, should be directing those moneys into R&D that would invent and build wind generators that don’t look/function like giant bird mincers, but of course, hot air is more important than getting stuff done.
Regardless, there is no shortage of land or capital in the US. There is severe shortage of will, and I’ll stop at that.
It makes a LOT of sense to float your solar arrays. It reduces water surface temperature and evaporation, so places that have agricultural or urban water supply reservoirs would probably pay some to have you place the solar cells there. At this point, you don’t lose any land at all and we have water surface area well in excess of what’s needed for distributed arrays that could power the whole US. The downside is that the places that are best for solar installs don’t have much water. But as noted, huge amounts of the western US are absolutely useless for anything else, and it’s even possible that in desert, taiga, and some tundra locations, solar cell shade would actually improve the local ecology.
Anyone who has the capital to do the initial investment, gets to sit back and suck up profit for the next 30 years (or until a tornado comes through.)
huh I’ve never seen anyone suggest this, but a big floating array that’s circular could rotate as a unit to do solar tracking with fewer moving parts than individual trackers. A few electric motor/propeller units and suddenly you have a significant performance increase.
This vastly complicates position holding in heavy winds, though, compared to having a ton of cables to lakebed anchors. Still, it would be so cool.
Some important hurdles:
-Sea bird guano
-Have you ever put something in the ocean long-term? Factor in massive maintenance costs and everything has to be aggressively over-engineered from the start
Ah the incredibly bad assumptions and simplistic math of renewable energy… Why wouldn’t you think twice about this? The array in the article above is 250 miles on a side, produces 100GW, and oh yeah, it’s brand new and ACTUALLY EXISTS. And it’s only enough to power their capital city (which is a big city, granted).
Your 20-mile array is obviously an exercise in gullible idealism, you should have some gut instinct/common sense that kicks in when you do some quick calculations and decide that you can power the United States of America with a single small orchard full of solar panels.
Correction: it does not yet actually exist, but is under construction. Looking at it on Google maps with the scale available shows it will be around ~5 miles wide and 250 miles long, so it’s not like it’s 250 miles square, but still much larger than 20-50 sq. miles.
Updated the article to include the 3 mi wide NASA and other sources have stated as I neglected to include it originally.
Target output is 100 GW, but you do have to account for space between panels, etc. as you mention.
Construction of the Great Solar Wall is estimated to be completed in 2030 with 5+ GW already operational at the end of last year. I was having trouble finding a more recent number than that. If I could read/write in Mandarin there’s probably a lot more info available.
Well, I’ve driven through the midwest, past the giant coal operations in the Powder River basin, and while not 20 miles on a side, they are definitely not small. Maybe we put the solar cells there and nobody can complain about the loss of valuable moonscape acres
So uh, why can’t we (the US) do this?
Maybe because someone said “drill baby, drill” :D
We’ve been having trouble with our infrastructure for far longer than we’ve had the current regime, though. Is it a problem with our political/economic system? Or have we (as a population) fallen below the IQ threshold for managing large-scale projects?
It will happen in the US when the oil lobbying groups are broke.
The motto can be traced back to 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drill,_baby,_drill , way before current regime. The other reply has it right, things may change when oil lobbying dies. Probably not, just some other interest will get in the way. Profit before habitat and head on into the Great Filter.
Improved IQ and memory, to not get played every few years, would help too. Squirrel!!! woof
Funny you say “profit” b/c the levellized cost of energy is cheaper now for solar and onshore wind than for anything else. If you were looking to invest in energy, you wouldn’t build a new coal/gas plant.
The invisible hand may be working slower than the iron fist, but I bet it’ll get the job done eventually.
I don’t think the IQ of the population matters to that – it is the short term thinking of the political classes more interested in scoring points off each other in the hopes of staying/getting into power or increasing the standing of their clan that means these big projects are always at risk of being tossed out unfinished or started. A great example being the TSR-2 aircraft, an aircraft of impressive performance for its day, that likely would have stayed in service a long time, maybe even still be in service now (though obviously an upgraded version) but instead it gets brutally scrapped as a project in a way to make sure it can’t be easily restarted should political winds change…
If you have all the politician actually pushing for their vision of the future and agreeing on the big projects they agree with no matter what their party leader claims is right, rather than throwing up roadblocks in the hope of making the other guys look bad…
Though I suppose it is the collective IQ of the people that puts these people in place, at least in a ‘democracy’ so you might have a point.
how many tons Ag