Quote Originally Posted by Louis VI the Fat View Post
I once read a report that said that with today's technology, a solar plant of 10.000km2 (About New Jersey?) could provide all the energy needs of Europe. If build, unfortunately, in the Sahara.

Luckily, America has the space and the sunshine in the Southwest.

Ah. Things are at last moving forward.
On Monday, a group of companies including some very big industrial concerns - Siemens, RWE, E.On - met with representatives of the German government and other political players to sign a memorandum of understanding that could eventually see the flowering of desert power - the Desertec Industrial Initiative.

Partners will now spend three years putting together viable financial packages that could plant solar facilities across large swathes of the Sahara by 2020.

There is talk of 400bn euros being invested. For comparison, that would dwarf the cost of the Iter fusion power project.


Remember those startling high-tech photos of mirrors gleaming in a Californian dawn that filled the covers of glossy magazines back in the 1980s? That's a concentrated solar thermal power station.
So is the space-age tower rising from Spanish soil, just outside Seville, which may soon provide enough electricity to meet that city's needs.

The Desertec project's initial goal is "to produce sufficient power to meet around 15% of Europe's electricity requirements and a substantial portion of the power needs of the producer countries".

These will be in North Africa and the Middle East, probably stretching round as far as Jordan, whose Prince Hassan bin Talal declared that "partnerships that will be formed across the regions as a result of the Desertec project will open a new chapter in relations between the people of the EU, West Asia and North Africa".

But the dreams are even bigger. Why not power much more of Europe from the region? Why not electrify much of South America from the Atacama desert and the mountain tops of Patagonia? Sydney and Melbourne from the Simpson desert, and western China from the expanding Gobi?

One reason why not may turn out to be security security of supply. Why trade dependence on Middle Eastern gas for dependence on Middle Eastern solar electricity, some would ask.

Politically, the project will build better bridges between the EU and countries that would like to be closer to it; other benefits could flow over those bridges. For EU nations, one of the attractions is that it provides a partial route to the target of providing 20% of the bloc's energy by 2020 - a target that, in many observers' eyes, is considerably more ambitious than the 20% greenhouse gas reductions that the EU has also pledged.
1) Why oh why is this mostly a German project, instead of an EU one. :bangshead:

2) We should never have given up on Algeria. We're swapping dependence on oil states for dependence on solar states. :bangsheadsomemore:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/