Archive for Desertec
Remember the Desertec project and how I was convinced ? Their goal is to build solar, wind and other renewable energies facilities to power North Africa, the Middle East and part of Europe.
Well, I am not the only one as their first plant will start construction next year. With a capacity of 500 MW it will cost 2.8 billion USD, or 2 billion euros. The first phase will bring 150 MW and will take two to four years to build.
500 megawatts don’t seem much really compared to the hundreds of gigawatts that are planned and needed, but you have to start somewhere. (via Ecogeek)
Living now in Paris I am able to go easily to conferences. Yesterday I was attending to a conference given by Mr.Paul van Son and Dr. Oliver Steinmetz, the CEO of Desertec Industries and member of the supervisory board, respectively.
Their enthusiasm and visionary ambitions are highly communicative. I now compare the Desertec project to the Apollo program which sent men on the moon in less than a decade. Many thought it couldn’t be done at the time.
David JC MacKay in his brilliant book Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air stated that Europe won’t be able to rely completely on local renewables. Continue reading “Why I am now convinced by Desertec” »
It is no news for you if you subscribed to this website : solar thermal alone could provide up to a quarter of global electricity by 2050. The use of molten salt could enable our civilization to store solar electricity for up to seven hours.
Morocco is ideally located to harvest all this energy as the average sunshine there is over 3,000 hours per year ( over 8 hours a day ). The Kingdom will build for $9 billion (6.6 billion euros) up to 2 GW of capacity.
This will be brought by five different plants of both solar photovoltaic and thermal and will answer up to 42 percent of the national need by 2020. Continue reading “Morocco to build five solar plants by 2020” »
According to Enerzine [Fr] and other sources the Desertec Project is getting international support as several companies from Europe, America and Africa are joining the Desertec Industrial Initiative (Dii).
The US company First Solar was the first to join in and five more companies from Morocco, Tunisia, France, Spain and Italy followed suit. Desertec is due to bring 15 percent of Europe’s energy by 2050.
For a closer look at this most interesting project, please refer to my first post on this topic. Be sure that I will keep you updated on Desertec, so stay tuned !
The fact has been known for years: harvesting the energy provided by the sun to a tiny fraction of the Earth could supply all the energy Humankind needs without greenhouse gases emissions or pollution due to operation.
This week many blogs and websites published articles on Desertec, a foundation that would like to install many concentrated solar thermal plants in the Sahara desert to provide a fraction of the electricity Europe needs.
But many problems will have to be solved : funding the project, transmitting the electricity through the desert and the Mediterranean sea and so on. Continue reading “Is Desertec a sound idea ?” »
