Solar plant in Morocco: King Mohamed VI. opens first plant – SPIEGEL ONLINE

 The sun’s energy has huge potential: go every year 630,000 terawatt hours of unused solar radiation energy in the deserts of Middle East and North Africa down. For comparison, the whole of Europe consumes about 4000 terawatt hours per year.

 If you were up to about 20,000 square kilometers of the North African desert solar thermal power plants, could be theoretically it gain so much power to meet the needs of Europe. The recovered clean stream would be transported with high-voltage direct current lines to Europe.

The principle familiar to anyone who has been on fire with a magnifying glass, holes in paper: Bundled sunbeams concentrated by parabolic mirrors, heat water, steam drives turbines and generate electricity. How a solar thermal power plant. Also at night: In salt stores, the heat generated on the day will be held for a few hours. Thus, the turbines can also run and generate electricity when the sun is not shining. The technology is old and proven: In California solar thermal power stations generate electricity since the eighties. In southern Spain, recently three new power stations were built

Solar thermal has advantages over photovoltaic. It is cheap and not so high-maintenance. Moreover, solar cells require expensive memory for the current, in order to ensure a supply at night. For solar cells produce direct current, whereas the detour has to be gone through heat and turbines with solar thermal.

 At night no sun shining, in molten salt storage can be chemically but save some of the heat during the day solar thermal – currently up to eight hours. Thus, the turbines can also run at night, the power supply is backed up continuously.

 In order to transport the stream over a distance of 3000 kilometers to Europe, one needs high-voltage direct current cables (HVDC). Normal AC lines are too lossy. HVDC cables have a loss of about three percent to 1,000 kilometers. These HVDC technology is available and proven.

The German Centre for Aerospace has calculated in a feasibility study that by 2050 around 400 billion euros will be needed to build as much solar thermal power plants that Europe could satisfy 15 percent of its electricity with it. € 350 billion would the plants cost about 50 billion euros, the pipeline network to transport the electricity from North Africa to Europe.

 Solar thermal energy is low-tech – reliable and risk-free. The plants can not explode, it will be no radioactive waste or harmful CO2 and you do not need coal, no oil and no uranium to operate it. Is broken a mirror module, it is easily exchanged – the operation of the power station is not disturbed. Another big advantage: If you build the power plants in coastal areas, could also to the power seawater desalination plants operate and much-needed water are produced for the North African countries. Politically and economically could the countries of the Middle East and North Africa to build on the export of clean electricity a solid economy and prosperity.

 Critics see the risk of dependence on the politically rather unstable countries in North Africa and the Middle East. In addition, the pipeline network could be the target of terrorists – the power of Europe would be at risk in the event of an attack. Political hurdles exist primarily in the fact that for an implementation of the Desertec concept cooperation both many European countries providers is needed as well as North Africa and the Middle East. These relationships, however, are historically burdened.