a) We create a 200 square mile solar field in the Sahara, from which cables run to Europe to supply electricity. To take this plant out, one just cuts the cables. There, you just plunged Europe into darkness.
b) We create a 20x 10 square mile solar fields in the Sahara, all dispersed over a very large area. Well, this is an engineering and construction project on the scale that dwarfs even the previous project. It is truly vast. Nevermind all the political issues again.
"Just cut the cables" isn't trivial. Have you ever seen a high voltage tower? Not only are they not accessible without professional gear, it's also going to require even more expensive gear to cut multiple inch thick conductors.
In all likelihood he power to Europe will be transmitted via multiple undersea cables, the effort of disrupting which would be unavailable to all but state agents, in which case the security issue is irrelevant, as you are likely already in a state of war.
It's a good thing then that there is a long history of all state agents in northern Africa maintaining friendly and stable relations with European governments.
(Yes, said Europeans also carry a great deal of responsibility for this situation, but that doesn't make the situation any more tractable).
The solution for taking out high voltage powerlines? A pair of Skilsaws hanging under a quadcopter. Drop down onto it and... something bad's going to happen!
edit: I also missed the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1lhGqNCZlA
edit 2: I scrolled around a bit and it's near the 30 minute mark.
Since we're talking about hypotheticals, I could say these things are also true:
1. There are counter-drones deployed and patrolling air space above the towers.
2. There are hundreds of independent power lines with 2N redundancy, so cutting 5-10 high voltage lines would do nothing.
3. The undersea cable points are protected by state agents and have good security for amateurs to compromise.
4. Europe will have 24-48 hours worth of storage even if ALL the lines are cut from the Solar Generation plants.
5. Europe will have backup power generation capacity in the form of locally stored and operated fossil fuel plants.
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In other words, there's absolutely no evidence that the future hypothetical solar installation is going to be more vulnerable than the infrastructure that already exists today, and surprisingly Europe doesn't plunge into darkness every week.
As to points 4 and 5, although storage and some backup capacity is reasonably feasible, this would mean that Europe could very well be forced to go to war in short order to get their full power supply back if a rogue organization gained power in North Africa.
Well, how many towers do you have to knock down using explosives before the lines fail?
The feet of the towers are simply accessible, so there's nothing stopping people from even just using a metal file. It wouldn't be safe, but you'd get the job done.
Or just plow a truck into their feet. You only really need to bend one of the feet and the wind will do the rest.
The thinking is in fact correct. The parent should have used a better, more serious, and guaranteed inevitable scenario: war. Bomb the concentrated infrastructure and take down all of Europe's power supply. It wouldn't take very high precision and it wouldn't take a vast number of hits: it would require a few, clumsy hits, which would be nearly impossible to stop.
The present system, which tends to be far more distributed than not (to take down all the power in Europe today, you need to hit a lot of spread out targets), is vastly superior to extreme concentration.
I agree with most of what you've said, but cutting a few inch thick conductors doesn't seem all that hard. I think a single stick of dynamite would do it pretty easily. Two for good measure. This would still be an act of war of course.
Further, outside of city's you can generally get solar panels from a roof to provide power for the building under it making the grid a lot more redundant vs cutting cables.
I think that roof top solar is just as viable in more or less the whole Europe - even in the Nordics, at least the southern parts.
The only thing that would make desert-sized solar plants a really good business would be really cheap low efficiency cells.
Isn't this a problem with any centralised electrical power source? In fact I've always thought that terrorists could cause far more disruption by taking out a couple of transmission line towers than blowing people up. And it would only take a decent sized spanner in many cases.
The only solution to this (and to the massive resistive losses over power lines) is localising power production. And that's where solar, wind, small-scale hydro and local battery storage look very effective.
Not that easy. Furthermore, it's the same for any large power plant of any type. This is a very poor argument against solar. It's also a stretch to imagine that Europe would rely on a single power plant for its sustenance.
If you wanted to take a power plant offline, solar included, you would target the grid connection wiring or the high volatage transformers.
This sentence seems to be at odds with itself. How does needing a large area concentrate security risks? If anything it seems to disperse them.
Unlike a coal or nuclear plant, you can't just walk up to a critical part of a solar farm and blow it up. Any part that you damage is relatively isolated from the parts you don't damage. Thus, it takes considerably more effort to take the entire plant offline.