Block’s Indicator of Sustainable Growth

by Ray Block

For over 30 years, visionaries in the Club of Rome have thought and dreamed of powering up the Sahara, the world’s biggest non-polar desert to supply renewable  energy to Europe, Middle East and North Africa.

This is the Desertec initiative, which has the support of both the German Chancellor,  the President of the European Union, and important sections of  European, mainly German industry. Dr Gerhard Knies of Hamburg is the eminent grise of Desertec.

The concept is that by far the largest technically accessible source of energy on the planet is to be found in the deserts around the equatorial regions.

Here, the air is very dry with little cloud cover, with the sun shining for more than six kilowatt hours per day per square meter. Concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) is designed to be used in desert and other arid areas.

The Desertec consortium of 12 members includes the world’s biggest reinsurance company, Munich Re, Deutsche Bank, HSN Nordbank,and two German utilities in RWE and E.On (the latter having just completed the world’s biggest wind farm, 627 wind turbines to generate  781.5 MW in west Texas.

Along with two electrical engineering firms in Siemens of Germany and ABB of Switzerland and Sweden, the international contracting company M+W Zander, there are three solar firms directly involved and one indirectly through Siemens.

These are the concentrating solar power groups MAN Millenium of Germany amd Abengoa Solar of Spain, along with the solar photovoltaics firm Schott of Germany.

The most recent solar entrant to the group comes through Siemens’s recent  acquisition of the Israeli concentrating solar power group, Solel at a cost of US$418 million.

Both Solel and Abengoa have a lot of experience in setting up CSP plants in desert conditions- with Solel in Israel and California, and Abengoa in Spain, Nevada and shortly in Arizona. Abengoa is also developing a CSP and combined-cycle gas plant for generating energy in Morocco and Algeria.

Also in the group are Cevital, the Algerian conglomerate, and indirectly the Moroccan Renewable Energy Development Centre, which buys in 96 per cent of its energy supplies, and is desperate for renewable energy.

The Desertec solar plan costed at $ 564 billion has no immediate start date at this stage, although it proposes to supply 15 per cent of Europe’s electricity supply by 2050.

Hermann Scheer, the german parliamentary member, who heads the European Association for Renewable Energy says “Sahara power for Northern Europe is a mirage- those behind the project know themselves that nothing will ever come out of this.”

Scheer  is a proponent of solar photovoltaics (PV), and there is a role for that technology. But CSP is more suitable in the desert, than in dense population  areas, where there are plenty of rooftops. 

With the European Union commissioners intending to allocate 16 billion euros ($23.5 billion) to the solar sector, it’s time for the Desertec consortium to get on its bike and start to move forward quickly.