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.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS