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CREDIT: Stuart Rankin (CC).

Desertec's Plan for Saharan Sun toPower Europe Burns Outchinadialogue | 01/05/2015

This article appeared originally on China Dialogue. It is published withkind permission. It was written by Eifion Rees.

As a concept, Desertec was ambitious. Produce abundant clean electricity forEurope from vast concentrating solar power (CSP) plants in the deserts of NorthAfrica and the Middle East.

But after five years attempting to turn theory into practice, the DesertecIndustrial Initiative (Dii), a consortium formed in 2009, is effectively dead in thewater after being abandoned by the majority of its shareholders. Dii hadpledged Desertec infrastructure would meet as much as 15 percent of Europe'selectricity needs by 2050. However, in October last year companies chose not torenew their contracts as part of the consortium. It's a long way from 2011,when Dii said Desertec was "all systems go."

It was building a 500MW CSP plant in Morocco; it was in talks with Tunisia andAlgeria to do the same; and from 2020 would "scale up" into Egypt, Libya,Syria, Saudi Arabia. All it needed was signatures on paperwork.

The price tag matched the hype. At a cost of 400 billion euros (US$480 billion),Dii would conjure electricity from the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa(MENA) region, feeding it to Europe along high-voltage undersea cables beneaththe Mediterranean. Dii estimated the region's wind and solar potential at 800GWacross 40,000 square kilometers.

Big names such as Siemens, Bosch, E.On, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, DeutscheBank, and Munich Re signed up. At its height there were some 57 Diishareholders from 16 countries, with Germany providing the most. But by late2012, Siemens and Bosch had pulled out and now only three shareholdersremain, to whom Dii will become a consultant: ACWA Power (Saudi Arabia),RWE (Germany), and the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC). SGCC joinedup to learn more about transferring renewable power from China's sparselypopulated western regions to its populous and power-hungry coastal cities.

Political instability clouded Desertec's prospects. "The Arab Spring uprisingscame at just the wrong time for Desertec. Energy security was always a worry,but suddenly it became a reality and investors got nervous," says Dr.Christopher Sansom of Cranfield University in Bedfordshire, an expert on CSPtechnology.

Wrong region?

With demand for energy in Africa as a whole far outstripping supply, the logic ofgenerating electricity for Europe struck many as bizarre, if not positively post-colonial. At an energy conference in 2012, the vice president of Algeria'sNational Economic and Social Council also questioned whether Europeanelectricity prices would "give us a return on investments."

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"It makes sense for the MENA countries to address their own supply issuesbefore looking to export energy to Europe," says Sansom.

Other factors in sinking the project included lack of shareholder consensus onhow the electricity should be produced, and which regions should benefit most,MENA or Europe.

Quitting Dii in 2013, the not-for-profit Desertec Foundationoriginator of theDesertec conceptcited "many irresolvable disputes . . . in the area of futurestrategies, obligations and their communication."

Exporting power to Europe was central to the initial Desertec concept. However,obtaining declarations of intent from MENA and European governments provedso arduous that Dii reined in its ambitions.

By June 2013, it was promising to meet only 10 percent of Europe's electricityneeds by 2050 and was focusing more on power projects to benefit MENAcountries.

Dii chief executive Paul van Son said Europe's infrastructure was not up to thejob of receiving cheap renewable energy from MENA and criticized Europe's"sleeping" leaders, who lacked a "sense of urgency" and "should build theinfrastructure." Van Son is departing for RWE in December 2014.

Europe's aging grids

The infrastructure and regulatory frameworks of key European countries turnedout to be a poor fit with Dii's ambitions as existing European grids are notrobust enough to cope with surges of energy generation from weather-dependent renewables.

Initially, Dii hoped to bring electricity into Europe through a cable betweenMorocco and Spain. But Spain was unwilling to tax its already overburdenednational grid. In May, the Brussels-based grid association Entso-E warned thateight European countries might need to cut back on solar and wind generationwhen demand was low to prevent overloading the grid. Spain was particularly atrisk, it warned, as its grid did not have enough capacity to export excess power.

AbuBakr Bahaj, who heads the University of Southampton's Energy and ClimateChange Division, says super-grids optimized for existing centralized powergeneration and distribution are "currently not flexible enough" to cope withmore energy from renewables at times of low demand. EU member statesagreed in October to build them, at a likely cost of 125 billion euros overdecades.

Yet Europe has a growing need for more green energy and such issues could bedealt with by control and storage strategies, and eventually smart grids, headds. He believes the Desertec concept is still a good one because it "competeshead on with centralized power stations operating day and night," couldeventually lessen dependence on more-polluting power plants, and offers theadditional benefit of providing energy to and power for desalination plants inAfrica.

Costly technology

But Desertec under Dii was also hobbled by its technology. In the years sinceDesertec was conceived, solar photovoltaic (PV) power, not CSP, has become thesolar technology of choice. Solar panels are cheaper, simpler, and can be usedanywhere. CSP is expensive, complicated and many-parted (parabolic troughsheating liquid to produce steam that drives turbines), and relies on high levelsof sun.

The mirrored troughs also require a ready and plentiful supply of water forcleaning the mirrors and cooling.

"It's difficult not to conclude that at least part of the [Desertec] collapse istraceable to the low cost of PV, now much lower than CSP," says solar energyexpert Dr. Richard Perez of the University at Albany, New York. Although CSPhas a higher capacity for storing energy, the advantage of PV is that it "does notrequire pristine direct sun to function adequately, making it deployableeverywhere and not only in arid locations," says Perez.

European countries, particularly Germany, were already invested in PV, whichdoes not need the bright desert sun, around which the entire Desertec conceptrevolves.

Indeed, responding to the launch of Dii in 2009, German parliamentarianProfessor Hermann Scheer, who was chairman of the World Council forRenewable Energy at the time, called Desertec a mirage that its initiators knewhad "no prospect of success." Dii had chosen to ignore new technologicalpossibilities for storing solar and wind power within Europe, he observed.

Learning curve

Could the Desertec concept still have its day in the sun? After all, an

International Energy Agency report concluded in October 2014 that solar powerwill achieve commercial "take-off" in the next decade and overtake fossil fuelsas the world's biggest source of electricity by 2050.

The flagship CSP plant announced by Dii in 2011 is being built at last in thedesert 200 kilometers from Marrakesh. However, it is being built by theMoroccan government to power Moroccan homes, as part of the country'sambitious plans to produce 42 percent of its electricity from solar, wind, andhydroelectric by 2020.

Similar plants are springing up in most MENA countries, creating a broadtechnological knowledge base, while the U.S. SunShot initiative is expected todrive down the cost of CSP over the next five years.

Meanwhile the TuNur project, a partnership that includes former Dii shareholderNur Energie, announced in October 2014 that it will go ahead with plans for 10CSP plants in Tunisia of 200MW each to feed power to Europe through Italy.TuNur is pure Desertec in concept, but like Desertec it needs to find backers,build plants, and deal with the complexities and costs of feeding electricity intothe European grid. Like Desertec it requires signatures on paperwork.

Similar proposals are likely in future as CSP becomes cheaper, provided theregion is sufficiently politically stable, Samson believes. But timing is critical. "In10 years" time, Europe will have already made other arrangements," he says."In that case the vision of EU power from the Saharan sun will have to waitanother 20 to 30 years."

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