Africa Is Building Solar Farm So Big It Could Power Europe

Generating enough power to justify the large sums of money being funneled into it has always been the biggest challenge for green energy sources. However, the industry is fast turning things around, coming up with better ways to use sustainable and environmentally friendly energy sources to power the world. One such project is the largest solar farm in the word being built in Africa, which is expected to produce enough energy to power Europe.

The monumental effort is called the Noor Ouarzazate Solar Complex, Futurism reports, and it is being built in Morocco. It will cover roughly 1,400,000 square meters of desert region. To put that into perspective, the project will be as big as over 200 football fields put together.

It will be built just 6 miles from Ouarzazate, right at the foot of the High Atlas range. There, it will be able to absorb direct sunlight for 330 days of put solar energy.

The farm will feature hundreds of gigantic mirrors to reflect sunlight, each of which is the size of a school bus. The reflectors will direct the energy gathered into the synthetic oil that is flowing through a series of pipes all over the compound. Once the oil heats up, it will cause water stored in the facility to heat up, turn into vapor, which will then power generators after directed at high pressures.

The Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy is largely responsible for the project and one of its members, Rachid Bayed spoke to BBC about the project. As Bayed put it, the concept is basically the same as processes that make use of oil or coal.

“It’s the same classic process used with fossil fuels, except that we are using the Sun’s heat as the source,” says Bayed.

Aside from providing local settlements with renewable power, the agency also hopes to produce energy for Europe, which contributed substantial amounts for the project.