remote power

Nobody's yet managed to install a floating wind turbine at sea, but Hydro and Siemens are giving it a go.

It's logistically much easier, and just as inconspicuous, to put huge solar farms in remote desert locations, as demonstrated by this Southern California project back in 2005. So why hasn't anyone put one in the Namib Desert to serve Botswana and South Africa?

A mini-grid 26 kW solar project was established in Namibia in 2004, which is excellent, but Eskom is only seriously looking at coal and nuclear power for the national grid. (The Western Cape wind farm being planned now is small-fry compared with the Californian solar project, which rivals conventional power stations in output.) One of the key challenges is transmission over long distances, but this can be addressed using HVDC, superconducting cables or hydrogen transport. Certainly there are far stronger arguments in favour of local generation of renewable energy being fed into the grid closer to where it's needed, but if Eskom continues to lean heavily on large-scale projects and long-distance electricity transmission (South Africa will be buying coal-fired power from Botswana as soon as a station can be built), it could at least use renewable sources.