SoftBank Group and Saudi Arabia plan to spend $200B building a solar power plant
I always look for the surprising angles in a development of this kind: the knock-on effects. Given 200GW of capacity, in Saudi Arabia, on some days there will be endless electricity.<p>What I'm thinking is that this will lead to innovation in industrial processes that can productively use a lot of energy in a 4-8 hour window...something you can turn on in a big way and then turn off. Such a process effectively "stores" the energy in the product. The larger the electricity share of such a process, the closer the marginal cost gets to zero during sunny times.<p>Most modern industrial processes aren't like that: either they're not very power constrained (e.g., a toy factory) or they need the power to be on for a while (e.g., a steel mill). But then again it makes sense these are the types of processing we've perfected, since that's the kind of power we've hard so far in large quantities (coal, nuclear).<p>Does anyone know of products that can be made quickly by the application of raw energy? I don't know how desalination works, but (just as an example) if there were such a desalination process then Saudi Arabia could desalinate tremendous amounts of water and store it...or even export it to neighbors.<p>I am not so excited about the idea of a fundamentalist monarchy---one that is helping starve the poor Yemenis---getting even more power, but I am excited about the downstream innovations the fact of nearly-free electricity could potentially create. If SA invents such processes, then they could be copied in other places.