Thank you for your input! You make an excellent point when you note that one of solar PV’s major advantages is its ability to localize power production with few additional infrastructure costs, and it’s an argument that industry experts have brought to the table in their questioning of Desertec. It’s hard to compete with the relative convenience and (relatively) quickly-decreasing prices of PV, huh? Still, the project’s founders and backers seem to be banking on the belief that the costs of CSP will fall with economies of scale and the refinement of technology, an assumption that I’d like to think isn’t devoid of rationality.

Perhaps I am being over-optimistic, but I wouldn’t write off Desertec just yet, even though something this massive might take ages to get off the ground.

I think the NYT’s use of the word ‘centralized’–which I appropriated for the description in this post–in the article I linked to above rests on the assumption that much of the power produced by the CSP and photovoltaic systems in North Africa and the Middle East will ultimately lead back to Europe. While the Redbook and concept summaries on the Desertec website emphasize that the power generated by these solar plants will meet the needs of not just the Europeans, the existence of the project’s European investors and of the proposed transmission lines connecting them to the bigger network (which has the bulk of its network links in Europe) suggest that it wasn’t exactly the Saudis or the North Africans who were seeking most to benefit from Desertec.

Long story short: the use of ‘centralized’ here is contingent on how evenly you think the wealth will be shared.

Sure, maybe power output increases will be greater than the cost of the added infrastructure, but the costs of solar pv are still decreasing while capital infrastructure costs for high power transmission are not reducing.

Don’t expect this project idea to ever get beyond the think tank.

Please read infos at http://www.desertec.org