I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me

If anybody reading this remembers the name of the artist who originally sang that song, I will buy you a Tonic T-shirt of your choice ... post your answers below and all the correct answers will be put into the Tonic hat to pick one lucky reader!

Anyway, a report in the UK Guardian this week says that scientists claim that an area slightly larger than Wales could one day generate enough solar power to supply all of Europe with clean electricity. It’s so exciting to me that I remembered the song whose title I am using as the heading for this post. Arnulf Jaeger-Waldau, speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, said it would require just 0.3 percent of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle East desert to meet all of Europe’s energy needs. With the building of huge solar farms producing electricity through photovoltaic cells, or using the heat to boil water to drive turbines, this energy could be sent to and across Europe through a new super grid. This grid would also allow wind power from UK and Denmark to be used as well as geothermal power from Iceland. The key to make this work is harnessing the intense power of the Sun in the Sahara, which could generate three times more power as could be generated in Europe.

The other key requirement would be the use of DC lines to transfer the power as the energy losses are far less than using traditional AC lines. It seems that technology for renewable sources of energy are really starting to catch on now and already planned for 2010 is Algeria's export of 6,000 megawatts of solar-generated energy to Europe. Of course, nothing is going to happen overnight, but by 2020 Europe could be starting to feel the effects of these initiatives to help reach its goal of 20 percent CO2 reduction  and increasing energy generated from renewable sources — "Wouldn’t it be good?"