Re: At scale??? Yes, easily
"The Great Saharan Desert in Africa is 3.6 million square miles and is prime for solar power (more than twelve hours per day)"
It's also amazingly good for sand blasting and burial by dunes. And 335 kilometers by 335 kilometers of solar panels would be a hard maintenance problem (quite apart from the capital cost of installation). And even where the Sahara is not primarily shifting sand, it's an incredibly harsh dust-ridden environment.
As a parallel, in the relatively mild environment of the Isle of Lewis (Hebrides, Scotland), less than ten years saw out the life span of many wind turbines due to the shell sand that blows off the beaches when the wind gets going.
Quite apart from which, even the Sahara is not 'virgin territory' where we can just march in and build solar farms - quite a lot of people look on it as theirs and they would have to agree.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
