COUNTRIES involved in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) cannot afford to fund the power needed by the mammoth radio telescope from national grids, Lourdes Verdes-Montenegro, extragalactic scientist at Spain’s Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, says.
Ms Verdes-Montenegro was speaking at the African-European Radio Astronomy Platform workshop in Brussels earlier this month.
There are also concerns about South Africa’s electricity supply, and that it will not be possible for the country to bear the full brunt of SKA power demand. However, no single country can, which is why the project is developing independent power solutions.
The €2bn SKA will be the largest radio telescope in the world. It will span both Australia and Africa, with the core site in South Africa. There will also be remote antenna stations in South Africa’s eight partner countries, Botswana, Namibia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique and Zambia.
One of the major attractions of the SKA will be the spin-off technologies. However, many of these are in high-technology areas such as computing power and antenna structures, the benefits of which will only be felt far into the future. Renewable energy technology is also being developed as the costs of electricity generation continue to rise.
South Africa’s long-term electricity capacity plan — the Integrated Resource Plan, which projects future demand, how it will be met and at what cost — says renewable energy technologies will generate 17,800MW of new capacity by 2030, with 8,400MW from photovoltaics, 1,000MW from concentrated solar power and 8,400MW from wind.
Remote SKA stations, such as those in the African partner countries, will each consume about 20GWh/year (20 gigawatt hours a year), the same amount as the town of Mount Fletcher in the Eastern Cape, which has about 5,000 people, she says.
"The SKA core (which will be near Carnarvon in the Northern Cape) will have an energy consumption of about 400GWh/year, which is the same as Bruges (city in Belgium), which has 100,000 people."
This is where Biostirling4SKA comes in. The project, part of the European Commission’s seventh framework programme for research, aims to develop hybrid solar plants to power the SKA. The three-year project, which began last year, has a total budget of €6.2m.
Ms Verdes-Montenegro emphasises, however, that this technology will also be able to be used for the African VLBI Network. The network is based on very long baseline interferometry — a radio astronomy technique that involves observing a single object through a number of telescopes simultaneously, so that all the telescopes act, in effect, as one big telescope.
According to the European Codes of Conduct for ICT, published in 2009, computing resources consume 1.5% of the world’s energy. There are initiatives within the SKA — through collaboration with partners such as IBM — to first make it possible to handle the large quantities of data the SKA will produce, and then to do it efficiently.
However, even if computers are developed that can efficiently process all of this data, the computers themselves will still have to be powered. In one day, the SKA antennas will collect more than 150 times the global internet traffic today.
"Radio astronomy stations will be concentrated in remote locations," says Ms Verdes-Montenegro. "They are away from power supplies, and (because the sites have to be) free of radio interference … (Also), it is a 24/7 operation and there has to be a point of storage (for power). It has to be sustainable," she says, noting that a major benefit will be excess power that can be used by nearby communities.
Director of SKA SA Bernie Fanaroff says while South Africa is not involved in the SKA project that deals with renewable energy and power generation, it hopes to be part of the work packages.
• Wild was a guest of Intelligence in Science at the EU Science Conference in Brussels.
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