There has been much conversation about how to power the world on green electricity.
One suggestion would be to fill the Sahara with solar panels. This would allow us to generate all the worlds power in a sustainable way (of course the world would need a significant amount of batteries as well for when the sun isn’t shining in the Sahara – it may be one of the sunniest places, but it is still night half the time.
Another point, is that it would not take the whole Sahara covered in Solar panels to power the world (424000 square miles or roughly 12% of it).
However, there is a bigger issue. Both Solar and wind turbines have an impact on weather in the area where they are set up. Both have been shown to roughly double the rainfall in an area.
If we were to turn the centre of the Sahara into a vast solar farm, it would likely increase rain enough for the rest of the desert to be used for something else. This increased rainfall is not going to be enough to allow rainforests to grow, but it would likely be enough rainfall for desert to make way for Savanah. This huge area could become home to millions of lion leopard elephant rhino and buffalo -after all the area that the human race has removed from the natural world it would be fantastic to return some back.
Now, while the centre of the Sahara is so harsh little can live there, there are communities of all sorts of animals that live around it. Various desert antelope live here along with Saharan cheetah. We should be careful not to destroy some wilderness to replace them with some other wilderness. Never the less, this is a fascinating possibility.
