Europe is considering plans to spend more than &pond;5 billion (US$10.1 billion) on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East.
More than 100 of the generators, each fitted with thousands of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to EU member nations.
Billions of watts of power could be generated this way, enough to provide Europe with one-sixth of its electricity needs and to allow it to make significant cuts in its carbon emissions.
At the same time, the stations would be used as desalination plants to provide desert countries with desperately needed supplies of fresh water.
Last week Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan presented details of the scheme -- named Desertec -- to the European Parliament.
"Countries with deserts, countries with high energy demand and countries with technology competence must cooperate," he told the parliament.
The project has been developed by the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Corporation and is supported by engineers and politicians in Europe as well as Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Jordan and other nations in the Middle East and Africa.
Europe would provide initial funds for developing the solar technology that will be needed to run plants as well as money for constructing prototype stations. After that, banks and financial institutions, as well as national governments, would take over the construction program, which could cost more than &pond;200 billion over the next 30 years.
"We don't make enough use of deserts," said physicist Gerhard Knies, cofounder of the scheme. "The sun beats down on them mercilessly during the day and heats the ground to tremendous temperatures. Then at night that heat is radiated back into the atmosphere. In other words, it is completely wasted. We need to stop that waste and exploit the vast amounts of energy that the sun beams down to us."
Scientists estimate that sunlight could provide 10,000 times the amount of energy needed to fulfil humanity's current energy needs. Transforming that solar radiation into a form to be exploited by humanity is difficult, however.
One solution proposed by the scheme's engineers is to use large areas of land on which to construct their solar plants. In Europe, land is costly. But in nations such as Morocco, Algeria and Libya it is cheap, mainly because they are scorched by the sun. The project aims to exploit that cheap land using a technique known as "concentrating solar power."
A plant consists of banks of several hundred giant mirrors that cover a large area of land of around a square kilometer. Each mirror's position can be carefully controlled to focus the sun's rays onto a central metal pillar that is filled with water. Prototype stations using this technique have already been tested in Spain and Algeria.
Once the sun's rays are focused on the pillar, temperatures inside start to soar to 800oC. The water inside the pillar is vaporized into superhot steam which is channeled off and used to drive turbines, which in turn generate electricity.
"It is proven technology," Knies said. "We have shown it works in our test plants."
Only small stations have been tested, but soon plants capable of generating 100 megawatts of power could be built, enough to provide the needs of a town. The Desertec project envisages a ring of a thousand of these stations being built along the coast of northern Africa and round into the Mediterranean coast of the Middle East. In this way, up to 100 billion watts of power could be generated: Two-thirds of it would be kept for local needs, while the rest -- around 30 billion watts -- would be exported to Europe.
An idea of how much power this represents is revealed through Britain's electricity generating capacity, which totals 12 billion watts.
But there is an added twist to the system. The superheated steam, after it has driven the plant's turbines, would then be piped through tanks of sea water which would boil and evaporate. Steam from the sea water would piped away and condensed and stored as fresh water.
"Essentially you get electricity and fresh water," Knies said. "The latter is going to be crucial for developing countries round the southern Mediterranean and in north Africa. Their populations are rising rapidly, but they have limited supplies of fresh water. Our solar power plants will not only generate electricity that they can sell to Europe, they will supply drinkable water that will sustain their thirsty populations."
There are drawbacks, however. At present electricity generated this way would cost around 15 eurocents to 20 eurocents (US$0.22 to US$0.29) a kilowatt-hour -- almost twice the cost of power generated by coal. At such prices, few nations would be tempted to switch to solar.
"Unless it is extremely cheap, it won't stop people using easy-to-get fossil fuels," John Gibbins, an energy engineer at Imperial College London, told Nature magazine last week.
However, Desertec's backers say improvements over the next decade should bring the cost of power from its plants to less than 10 eurocents a kilowatt-hour, making it competitive with traditionally generated power.
Other critics say that the plants would be built in several unstable states that could cut their supplies to Europe. Again, Knies dismissed the danger.
"It's not like oil. Solar power is gone once it hits your mirrors. It would simply be lost income," he said.
The European Parliament has asked Desertec to propose short-term demonstration projects.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs