Desertec Sahara Solar Project Could Power Half the World

Knies even went so far as to say that the desert received enough energy in a few hours to power the world for a year. While Shuman was thwarted by a world war, Knies spent two decades work­ing to develop desert solar power as a viable energy source, and his efforts resulted in the project “Desertec.”

What is Desertec?

Desertec is a set of plans for a mas­sive net­work of solar and wind farms stretch­ing across the Mena region and intended to con­nect to Europe via high volt­age direct cur­rent trans­mis­sion cables (which are sup­posed to only lose 3% of their elec­tric­ity per 1000km, or 620 miles).

Although Desertec has been widely regarded as noth­ing more than an unat­tain­able dream for most of its his­tory, it’s been gain­ing some momen­tum over the past two years. A num­ber of sig­nif­i­cant German cor­po­ra­tions – includ­ing E. ON, Munich Re, Siemens, and Deutsche Bank – have all signed on with the project, form­ing the Desertec Industrial Initiative (Dii). Germany’s deci­sion to speed up the sched­ule to dis­man­tle its nuclear power plants ear­lier this year has also helped gen­er­ate more German sup­port for Desertec, and the first phase of con­struc­tion is set to begin in Morocco next year.

The Dii isn’t entirely German, although half the cor­po­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tives at its annual con­fer­ence in Cairo last month hailed from that coun­try, and the main com­po­nent of the cur­rent tech­nol­ogy (glass troughs, see below) are only made by German com­pa­nies. Paul Van Son, Dii’s CEO, claims the project is inter­na­tional in nature. According to the Guardian, he said:

“Yes, the ini­tia­tive came from Germany. But there are 15 dif­fer­ent nation­al­i­ties involved, includ­ing com­pa­nies such as HSBC and Morgan Stanley. This is just the start.”

As noted in one of our roundup posts last month, the French (a big energy player, of course) are also get­ting on board the Desertec project now.