Cloud-based Generation and Transfer of Solar Power in a Global Scale

One of the most important resources we need today is electricity to carry out comfortably our day-to-day activities. While many nations in the world are abundantly enjoying this resource, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. Most of these people are from developing nations typically from Africa and India. They happen to be poor and living in remote villages and mountainous terrains. Several agencies like the World Bank, UNDP, IEA and some developed countries are already taking steps to alleviate this energy poverty with the aim to achieve universal access to electrical power by the year 2030. These efforts are being implemented through well-known methods of electrical power production—both renewable as well as other types, one of which is harvesting the solar energy. As we know, sunlight is not available continuously, 24 hours per day. But what if we could make it so? Since one half the earth’s hemisphere does have sunlight, while the other half experiences night time, what if donor countries having the sunshine store the solar energy so it could be used during the night in receiver countries augmented by other types of electrical power? If one such country has excess solar energy, that portion can be transmitted to the country in need. While the infrastructure to directly transfer the energy may be cost prohibitive, perhaps it can be transformed and shared indirectly. However, this type of power sharing of solar energy from one country to another has not been investigated so far. As an initial step, we discuss in this paper a novel approach to transfer digitized temperature of molten salt, used to generate solar power. Molten salt-based generation of solar power has been proved to be more productive and cost effective compared to other methods. Many countries such as USA, Germany, France and Spain are adopting Molten Saltbased technology. If these countries are willing, the temperature of the molten salt can be accessed in parallel to their operation, digitized and uploaded into a private cloud, set up by these countries along with a developing nation. The developing nation can then download the digitized temperature and convert it back into electrical power for distribution.