They say 50 square kilometers of this could power Australia. That's a piece of land that measures 5 kilometers by 10 kilometers. Or is it 500 square kilometers. A piece of land measuring 50 kilometers by 10 kilometers? I don't remember. I do know that I am sick of people whining about hydro, solar, wind, tidal, and especially geothermal, apparently most abandoned oil wells in the US have geothermal potential. Just build as much of this as possible, it just doesn't matter, the world is hungry for power.
My hometown is small and has two major electrical generating facilities, I have had the opportunity to think about this issue. Also, I'm from "oil money"; my grandfather wore a hard hat at a Shell terminal for 40 years.
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It's pretty easy to drop cable underwater, like between Connecticut and Long Island. Here is a partial list:
Baltic-Cable (between Germany and Sweden)
Basslink (between Victoria, Australia and Tasmania, Australia)
Cross-Skagerrak (between Norway and Denmark)
Cross Sound Cable (between New York and Connecticut, USA)
Estlink (between Estonia and Finland)
Fenno-Skan (Powerline between Sweden and Finland)
HVDC Cross-Channel (Submarine cable between UK and France)
HVDC Gotland (the first commercial HVDC submarine cable installation)
HVDC Hokkaido-Honschu (between Hokkaido and Honshu)
HVDC Inter-Island (Power line between the islands of New Zealand)
HVDC Italy-Corsica-Sardinia (SACOI, Submarine cable link between Italy, Corsica and Sardinia)
HVDC Italy-Greece (between Italy and Greece)
HVDC Leyte - Luzon (between Leyte and Luzon)
HVDC Moyle (between Scotland and Northern Ireland)
HVDC NorNed (between Eemshaven and Fedafjord)
HVDC Vancouver Island (link between Vancouver Island and the Canadian mainland)
Kii Channel HVDC system (through Kii-channel, Japan)
Kontek (between Germany and Denmark)
Konti-Skan (Powerline between Sweden and Denmark)
Swepol (between Poland and Sweden)
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Aussie Solar + Indonesian HVAC/HVDC = Lots of new utility customers.
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In Africa and India, individual househould photovoltaic is the thing.
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When I'm not staring at ESPN's GameDay Baseball, playing sit and go poker and listening to dub, my internet reading takes me to places such as TREC, which is in the Wikipedia:
Looking at the maps, I would say that electricity and desalination are two interrelated topics.
The big box is how much land it would take for world electricity. The smallest box is just for Germany. The middle box is EU-25.
In America, the oil is located in Republican territory: Texas, Oklahoma, Alaska, the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains area. Houston is the center. Think for a second: if it was in Vermont, no one would ever complain about the oil companies. Roustabouts and refinery men would come out of Boston, Montreal and Brooklyn. The Beaumont Triangle would be on the coast of Maine, and up on the St Laurence Seaway. "In NFL action, the Boston Oilers host the Houston Balers, Sunday at 4:15 PM." It's a different world.
So in England, France, China et cetera, the oil is not necessarily in Chinese Texas or British Alaska. This Republican ownership of the oil industry has caused no end of trouble in the USA. The point of it is that non-GOP oil sites on the internet are perfectly sanguine about our solar future, no trash-talking whatsoever. www.oilandgas.com is the link, I think.
So build as much capacity as possible. Build build build. If in the near future, 1 billion new air conditioners are installed, the power will definitely not go to waste.
This is a tank farm for a medium-sized oil and coal powered electrical plant, I've ridden by this a thousand times. This one might need some upkeep.
This is Manhattan in the winter. Brrrr.Desalination
The only problem with an idea like this, is that if there's no money in it, people just won't be interested.
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