DESERTEC’S SAHARA SUN TO EU MOVES AHEAD

Energy From North Africa; Massive European Solar Project Set for Launch
June 16, 2009 (Der Spiegel International)
and
Munich Re touts Sahara in solar energy push
Marilyn Gerlach, Jonathan Gould, Christoph Steitz, Peter Dinkloh, Anneli Palmen, Jens Hack and Christian Kraemer (w/John Stonestreet), June 16, 2009 (Reuters)
and
German blue chip firms throw weight behind north African solar project; Siemens, Deutsche Bank, RWE and E.on ready to invest in ambitious plan to power Europe with clean electricity from Africa
Kate Connolly, June 16, 2009 (UK Guardian)
and
Reply by the DESERTEC Foundation to the Press Release from EUROSOLAR/Hermann Scheer
18 June 2009 (Desertec Foundation)

SUMMARY
Munich Re, one of Germany’s biggest financial institutions, will back the €400 billion ($555.3 billion) plan to develop solar power plants throughout the Middle East and North Africa and build a high voltage transmission system to deliver the solar energy-generated electricity across the Mediterranean to Europe.

Munich Re is inviting 20 major German corporate entities, including Deutsche Bank, Siemens, E.ON, RWE and Solar Millennium, to a consortium meeting on July 13 to further structure the way forward.

The Desertec Concept Redpaper, from the Desertec Foundation, describes the idea that has been around since it was proposed in 2003 by the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC), a network of scientists and politicians, at the legendary and influential Club of Rome. The Club of Rome and the German Economy Ministry will be involved in the Munich Re initiative.

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In the Desertec Foundation plan, the consortium’s €400 billion ($555.3 billion) investment would create the generating capacity and transmission infrastructure to deliver 100 gigawatts of solar energy-generated electricity from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) nations.

Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek is the executive driving the new initiative. His explanation is that Munich Re, as a multinational insurance institution, stands to suffer huge losses if the worst impacts of global climate change become a reality. It is a far smarter undertaking for Munich Re and companies like it to invest a few hundred billion euros now than to ignore the impending disasters and wind up on the hook for hundreds of trillions to their insurees in a few decades

The first step will be a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to form the Desertec Industrial Initiative. The intiative would begin with further feasibility studies to precisely define the undertaking.

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According to Jeworrek, the earliest projects will include a 2-gigawatt solar power plant in Tunisia and a high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission connection to Italy. After it gets regulatory approval, it will likely take 5 years.

Jeworrek foresees the full 100-gigawatt installed capacity potential of Desertec taking until 2050 to achieve. Though it will eventually involve many European, North African and Middle Eastern nations, Jeworrek expects initial cooperation between Germany, Italy and Spain. French President Nicolas Sarkozy last year expressed a willingness to work with Mediterranean nations but France’s ability to participate may be blocked by its influential nuclear industry.

Solar energy pioneer Hermann Scheer, a German parliamentary member and President of Eurosolar, the European Association for Renewable Energy, opposes and dismisses the plan. Harkening back to the vision of solar energy on every rooftop and the dream of distributed generation, he objects to the highly centralized, corporate control of the electricity that would come from Desertec. He also foresees all the problems that come with ambitious, multinational concepts such as cost overruns, logistical delays, missed deadlines and international disputes. In addition, Scheer says Desertec presents challenges from the harsh desert elements, like sandstorms.

From CNN via YouTube

COMMENTARY
Spread across an enormous region from Turkey to Gibraltar, Desertec would be the biggest New Energy undertaking anywhere, ever.

Is it plausible? Yes. A European Commission Institute for Energy calculation found 0.3% of the sunlight falling on the MENA nations could power all of Europe.

Desertec requires no new technologies, just a massive investment commitment to solar power plant development in the Mahgreb (the coastal Mediterranean deserts of Northern Africa and the Sahara) and the arid sun-drenched circum-Suez lands of the MENA, north and east to the Caucasus. In those regions, the insolation (solar radiation per square meter) is so good it would take a serious effort to make solar power plants fail.

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Solar power plants use the heat of the sun instead of its light. The 2 primary competing design concepts, one using curved mirrors and one using flat mirrors, are going into operation in deserts the world over.

The curved mirror technology was proven productive in California’s Mojave Desert in the 1980s but could not get traction in the 1990s because natural gas fell to prices so low it was impossible for utility-scale solar plants to compete economically. In the curved mirror solar power system, a working liquid flows through pipes that run in the focal point of a field of parabolic mirrors. Heated to 700 degrees Fahrenheit or more, the liquid flows to a boiler where the heat creates steam that drives a turbine.

A solar power tower and a field of flat mirrors that focus the sun’s heat on a point atop the central tower is the second primary solar power plant technology. The mirrors again heat a working liquid in pipes, this time at the top of the tower, and the heated liquid it again flows to a boiler to create steam to drive a generator.

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The Desertec plan is not far enough along to have specified a chosen technology.

Desertec will also require a massive investment commitment to high voltage direct current transmission (HVDC). Older, alternating current (AC) transmission has traditionally been considered too inefficient to carry such massive amounts of electricity but newer 765 kV (and higher) HVDC lines are considered up to the task. Plans exist for expansion of sub-Mediterranean natural gas and oil pipelines and tranmission planners have already begun anticipating the laying of conduit for electric lines alongside them.

Concentrating Solar Power for the Mediterranean Region
and Trans-Mediterranean Interconnection for Concentrating Solar Power are definitive studies on the concept from the German Aerospace Center and affiliated research institutions. They pretty thoroughly documented the feasibility of the undertaking.

Hans Müller-Steinhagen, who works at the German Aerospace Center and knows the research, affirms the reports’ conclusions that the project could be sending electricity to Europe before 2025 and be supplying 20% or more of Europe’s power by mid-century.

If German solar pioneer Hermann Scheer is the most prominent and important opponent of the massive, centralized power generation plan, he is hardly the only one. Many, like Scheer, are dubious of the size and scope of the undertaking. Others believe the cost will be too great.

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European environmentalists are enthusiastic. Size and scope are not untenable given that Europe must get that much electricity from somewhere. The cost will be burdensome but expenses must be borne if a shift to New Energy is to be accomplished and – given the urgency created by global climate change – there must be such a shift.

Munich Re’s Jeworrek says the project will be paying for itself before it is 2 decades along.

A curious objection to Desertec heard in the semi-private circles of cyberspace has to do with what sound much like fears and prejudices lingering from stereotypes of North African and Middle Eastern peoples created during the 1970s oil crises and severely exacerbated by the heinous actions of the breakaway violent Muslim extremists of the last 2 decades.

Would building such a system make Europe vulnerable to cuts in electricity that mimick the oil embargoes of the 70s? Would it make Europe more subject to terrorist attacks that leave its population in the dark?

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First, a history lesson: Those oil embargoes, incomplete and short-circuited as they were, almost ruined OPEC and OPEC knows it. Such disruptions are extremely unlikely to recur. The most power OPEC now has is some price leverage. Though some Middle Eastern zealots mistakenly thought otherwise, price leverage and not geopolitical gamesmanship was and is the only reason there is an OPEC.

Europe has more to worry about in the way of an energy supply curtailment from its excessive dependence on Russian natural gas. It has already experienced natural gas supply disruptions at least as problematic as the 70s oil supply disruptions.

Desertec is a hedge agains the power of the Russian Bear. And Russian natural gas is a hedge against the power of (and terrorist threats to) Desertec.

And Desertec is far more than a building up of dependence on MENA solar energy. It is an addition of solar energy to the European SuperGrid that will link the EU’s gargantuan wind assets, its significant ocean energy and geothermal assets, its biomass capacity and its access to MENA sun together in a huge trans-continentaly web of New Energy abundance.

Should one source of supply be interrupted, it will merely necessitate a shift to other sources via the heightened capacity of an intelligent SuperGrid to manage and manipulate generation while the interrupted supply source is restored.

Footnote: The first report to the Club of Rome, in 1972, was the controversial The Limits to Growth, one of the earliest modern predictions that global demographics and global resources were unevenly matched.

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QUOTES
- Spokesman, Desertec Foundation: "We have approached Munich Re to get industrial companies on board and Munich Re organised the meeting with the other companies…" Munich Re: “We want to start an initiative that would present concrete plans in two to three years' time…"
- Jeworrek, Board of Directors, Munich Re: "[The Desertec initiative hopes to] present concrete plans in two to three years' time…"
- Hans Müller-Steinhagen, Desertec expert, German Aerospace Center: "After the solar thermal power plants were built in California and Nevada…people lost interest in solar thermal power because fossil fuels became unbeatably cheap."

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- Hermann Scheer, German Member of Parliament and President, Eurosolar: "[The Desertec project is] highly problematic…I would urge the investors to stay clear of it…[It will] duplicate the current system [of centralized generation]… We should be looking instead at decentralising the system, and looking closer to home for our energy supplies, such as solar panels on homes or harnessing wind energy on the coasts, or inland…"
- Andree Bohling, spokesperson, Greenpeace: "Businesses have finally recognised that renewable energies belong to the future, and in times of economic crisis this also sends out an important signal for economic growth…"
Regine Gunther, climate expert, WWF: "They want to and indeed must profit from this solution as much as us…"