Noor

Ouarzazate, Morocco

Not far from the ancient fortress of Ait Benhaddou is an ultra-modern power facility.

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نور  / Noor / Light

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The Sahara Desert receives 22 million Terawatt hours of energy from the sun every year. That’s well over 100 times more energy than humanity consumes annually.

Think about that for a minute. Harnessing just 1% of the Sahara’s solar power could replace fossil fuels, atomic energy, and every other source of energy the human race requires.  We could warm, cool, and light our houses, fuel factories, cook our food, and transport people and goods, using only a tiny fraction of the Sahara’s sunlight.

So why don’t we? The simple answer is, we do.

A consortium of Saudi Arabian, Spanish and Moroccan power companies have built the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant, near Ouarzazate, Morocco. The Noor Power Station utilizes 2,000,000 mirrors mounted on 7000 panels, positioned in such a way that abundant Saharan sunlight is reflected onto a 240m tower filled with molten salt, heating it to 1000°C. The heat converts water to steam, which drives turbines to generate electricity.

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This was as close as we could get to the Noor Power Station today.  It is the white tower with a black ring you can barely see to the left of the sign that says,

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Ouarzazate has an average of 350 days of sunshine per year. On those rare occasions when it is cloudy, the molten salt cannot be allowed to cool beyond a certain point. The Noor Power Plant has backup diesel generators that heat the salt when the sun cannot.

The Sahara has as much wind as it does sunshine. Driving winds pick up sand particles and deposit them on the power plant’s mirror surfaces. Mirrors can only generate solar power if they are clean, so they must be washed every night, a process that uses 3 million m³ of water annually.

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There are obstacles to expanding the use of Saharan sun to fuel humanity, but scientists are working on it.

Someday, the world may be powered by…

… Noor

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