If you put solar in the desert SW, and intend for it to power homes in New England, how much does the transmission lines to move that power cost? And how much do you lose in transit?
I don't recall where I had seen it, but there was a study at some point on the cost of covering the Sahara in solar panels. The CO2 emissions from the resources for the transmission lines- in steel and concrete especially- meant it would be a net positive CO2 contributor even after shuttering fossil fuel power plants.
This means that we need to learn how to build transmission lines with less steel and concrete. Use more aluminum maybe? More plastics and carbon fiber? More glass?
plastics and carbon fiber are made with hydrocarbons generally. Aluminum might actually be worse, since aluminum requires very high amounts of energy to produce.
Solar energy used to produce aluminum has zero marginal cost. So, unless you assume use of fossil fuels to produce the power used to refine the aluminum, this is nonsense.
Hydrocarbons are not a problem per se. It's burning the hydrocarbons, specifically the carbon part, which has the detrimental effect on climate.
Plastics and carbon fiber effectively keep the carbon from becoming CO₂.
Aluminum takes a lot of energy, but, unlike steel, the process does not release any CO₂, and is fully electric. It can be powered by hydro (and often is), nuclear, or solar energy directly.That's the point.
Robert A. Heinlein wrote a book called Friday that had something like this. They would use huge solar arrays to charge proprietary solid state batteries called Shipstones which were used everywhere. There wasn't even a power grid anymore because people would just buy a Shipstone and put it into their house and replace it every so often like coal in a coal bin.
I love Friday and just reread it last weekend. Often I think that Elon Musk believes he is a character in a Heinlein novel. Tesla is Shipstone, the cars are just a mechanism to build better batteries. SpaceX, that's just DD Harriman from the man who sold the moon/sail beyond the sunset. The Boring company is how you build Luna City ala The moon is a harsh mistress. Or maybe a space catapult. Or maybe, I'm just hoping for Heinleinian hero.
I think the problem here is the weight of the batteries and the need for power to move them. Maybe hydrogen by electrolysis would be more favorable, but then you need to pipe in water.
You don't necessarily need to pipe the water to the electricity, you can move the electricity to where the water is (and if the electrolysis works with seawater, you don't need freshwater either). And then you can turn it into something like Methane or Ammonia for longer term storage. And the long term storage is important to level the power production over the course of months.
I think the issue at hand is that long distance transmission of electricity has transmission loss, and is expensive from an infrastructure standpoint. The broader point is that remote solar generation presents some challenges.
Transmission loss matters very little anymore. You just add more panels at the source. Marginal cost of the loss is zero. It is very, very cheap to deliver power by transmission line.
Yes, I made exactly that point above. But the point I'm making is that long distance transmission of water is also expensive from an infrastructure standpoint, possibly even more expensive than power (and also sometimes has transmission losses, depending on how they're moving it)
Theres plenty of resources out there around this idea.