News & Views item - November 2007

 

Sahara Desert Could Become Home to Solar-Power Plants -- Red-Hot Australia Just the Spot for Solar Energy Projects. (November 29, 2007)

The first part of the headline comes from Today's Nature, the second from today's Age.

 

In the Melbourne  Age Alister Doyle and Chee Chee Leung report: "America's space agency, NASA, has pinpointed the world's sunniest spots by studying maps compiled by US and European satellites. Red shows the regions that receive the most sun, such as the middle of the Pacific Ocean and the Sahara Desert in Niger, followed by orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and pink.

 

 University of NSW renewable energy expert Dr Mark Diesendorf told The Age maps such as this not only helped companies interested in building solar power stations but illustrated the energy possibilities of the sun. "Australia has got lots of solar energy potential, and it's not doing enough to tap into that," while CSIRO's Dr Wes Stein says CSIRO is set to start its own project, incorporating satellite data, to model in detail the spread of solar radiation across the country. "That would give us a very good idea of solar power available in Australia," Dr Stein said.

 

Meanwhile Nature's Emiliano Feresin writes that Europe is looking to draw power from Africa. The plan being put forward by "a group of scientists, economists and businessmen, involves peppering the Sahara Desert with solar thermal power plants, then transmitting the electricity through massive grids.

 

The plan dubbed DESERTEC, has just been presented to members of the European Parliament in Brussels and as Nature describes it: "it would require roughly 1,000 100-megawatt power plants, using mirrors to concentrate energy from the Sun's rays, throughout the Middle East and North Africa to meet the region's projected energy needs. A high-efficiency electricity grid, yet to be built, would then ferry the power around and across the Mediterranean Sea and northern Europe."

 

According to Gerhard Knies, a retired physicist based in Hamburg, Germany: "The technology for the DESERTEC concept is available and can offer unlimited, cheap and carbon-dioxide-free energy to Europe."

 

The European Union has a binding target to get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, but with at a cost estimated to be almost €400 billion (A$672 billion) its political acceptability is far from certain.

 

Mr Feresin writes that solar thermal power as it would be utilised in the DESERTEC scheme (using solar energy stored in a special heat-retaining fluid to drive a turbine and create power) was first demonstrated in 1982 with a 10-megawatt plant in California's Mojave Desert.

 

Solar thermal plants can now produce electricity at a cost of about 15-20 eurocents per kilowatt-hour and it's claimed that further improvements in technology and scale could bring that down to less than 10 eurocents per kilowatt-hour, making it more competitive with coal.

Initial solar thermal plants are being planned in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco, with more under construction in Spain and Italy.

 

Dan Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley told Nature: "Right now, 1,000 megawatts of solar thermal energy are being built in California and Nevada deserts, and we are planning an additional 5,000 megawatts. Exploiting solar energy from deserts is a good idea worldwide."

 

The map below shows the renewable energy grid for Europe as it is laid out in the proposal put forward in Brussels.