Making the Sahara desert a wind and solar farm could make it green

You have probably had a solar energy calculator since the 1980s, but it has only been around for a decade that the potential of large-scale solar installations has been widely explored. Exploiting the power of the sun that hits our planet and using that power to solve our energy problems seems to be obvious, and what better place to build a light-capping facility than the Sahara Desert?

The Sahara is the largest desert in the world. There is also wind, dry and sunny. The construction of a wind and solar energy facility in the sands could be a huge victory for humanity, but a new study published in Science shows that it could actually make the desert less like the desert.

The Sahara is dry and smooth and bright. Solar panels – and the various materials that come with them – are darker than the surrounding sand. Meanwhile, wind turbines do not just generate energy from winds, which makes them spin; they can actually affect wind behavior over larger areas.

By anticipating what could happen if a large-scale energy facility were to be built there, the researchers looked at all the different factors that could affect the local climate. By calculating the changes and integrating them into a climate model, the team reports that the results show a dramatic increase in precipitation in the region, as well as temperature changes.

"We have found that large-scale installation of solar and wind farms can generate more precipitation and vegetation growth in these areas," says Eugenia Kalnay of the University of Maryland, co-author of the study. . "The increase in precipitation is a consequence of the complex land-atmosphere interactions that occur because solar panels and wind turbines create rougher and darker land surfaces."

The increase in rainfall could cause a return of vegetation on a large area, bringing the desert back to life in a way that no one had really considered before. The hypothetical energy facility used in the modeling would be able to generate more than four times the current global energy demand. Obviously, building a solar and wind farm of this magnitude is easier said than done, but science says it could have incredible benefits.