Europe’s Desertec Project To Tap Africa For Solar Power?

Moving forward in what would be the world’s largest centralized solar power production project if realized, a consortium of 20 German businesses announced last week plans to finance Desertec, a solar project nearly as contentious as it is ambitious. The €400 billion ($555 billion) endeavor seeks to capture the ample sunlight of the North African desert and to convert it, through concentrating solar power (CSP), into electricity to be funneled back to Europe through high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines. The project (alternately known as the DESERTEC Industrial Initiative) has the capacity to fulfill 15 percent of Europe’s energy needs—a selling point illustrated on the website of the DESERTEC Foundation, which states that “[within] 6 hours deserts receive more energy from the sun than humankind consumes in a year.”

As befits such a grand undertaking, many multinational European and Mediterranean-area organizations have jumped aboard, especially since they were the ones to conceive the idea in the first place. The Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC), Eumena (the European Union, the Mediterranean and North Africa), the Union of the Mediterranean and the Club of Rome are all backers of Desertec, and Gerhard Knies, the coordinator of TREC, also acts as the chairman of Desertec’s advisory board. German insurance behemoth Munich Re is spearheading the initiative to pursue financing, supported by other German giants such as Siemens, Deutsche Bank and E.On, with a coalition-cementing meeting scheduled for July 13.

Despite the enthusiasm of Desertec’s corporate (and non-corporate) backers, The NY Times Green, Inc. article linked above pits the enthusiasm of the project’s supporters with the head-scratching and alarm of its detractors, presenting a diverse array of opinions.

In a collection of reactions gathered by Spiegel Online, several observers seemed to welcome the development.

“The project is sending a strong signal that investments in renewable energies don’t just make ecological sense,” wrote The Financial Times Deutschland, “they make economic sense as well.”

A reader at Green Inc. simply said: “Europeans need energy and have cash. Africans have sun and territory. It is quite logical to combine all this.”

At the same time, however:

“It must once again be pointed out that the most successful method of harvesting solar power is with rooftop panels,” wrote the German daily Die Tageszeitung. “In just three to five years, power from the roof will be cheaper than electricity from the wall plug. The economic bar for desert power is, in other words, high. Solar power produced in a decentralized manner will likely always be the cheaper variety.”

The German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, meanwhile, quoted Frank Asbeck, the chief executive of SolarWorld, the largest German solar company, as saying, “Building solar power plants in politically unstable countries opens you to the same kind of dependency as the situation with oil.”

Gerhard Knies attempted to sweep away such concerns by looking on the positive side, arguing that the benefits will outweigh the costs.

“Well, when you look at the Mediterranean region, the most unstable country is Italy,” he said, adding that in any case, the investment in large-scale energy projects in these areas would provide income, jobs and the creation of a new industry — all of which, Mr. Knies said, were “a contribution to stability.”

He also suggested that the additional transmission costs of such a project would be smaller than the gains associated with improved solar radiation in the African desert. The additional power yield, Mr. Knies said, would more than compensate for the cost of transmission to European markets.

In addition to the above arguments against the Desertec cooperative, others still were upset by the imperialistic implications of such a project, drawing connections to the European legacy of resource exploitation in Africa.

What do you think, readers? Does such an enormous project seem feasible, and, if so, is it worth the investment and the costs?

NB: In case anybody is wondering—what’s the difference between Desertec and the Mediterranean Solar Plan, President Sarkozy’s nearly identical project from late 2008/very early 2009? Not much, apparently. According to a 2008 press release, “TREC is the father of the Solar Plan,” while the MSP has become the “flagship project” of the Union for the Mediterranean, a Desertec supporter. Torsten Jeworrek, a Munich Re board member, “reserved judgment on French participation,” commenting that the French “are still relying heavily on nuclear energy.” I’m still somewhat hazy on the differences myself, so some extra clarification would be most welcome.