During my June trip to Europe, my German friends were talking about a project to create a “huge” solar thermal field in the Sahara to generate electricity for Europe. This sounded unbelievable, and my thoughts went to concerns about reliability and safety of the transmission method.Well, it is a reality and last week the story was see in several print and web media, including the Economist -- http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13982870
Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance company, has invited 20 large companies to join it in developing this massive solar thermal field to satisfy 15% of Europe’s needs by 2050. The project is called Desertec and the companies invited to join this venture include Siemens (Germany’s engineering giant) power suppliers RWE and E.ON, and Deutsche Bank, Germany’s biggest bank.
Why would an insurance company promote this project? Munich Re’s goal is to reduce weather-related losses due to global warming.
Even though Desertec is still a vision, and there are risks having 15% of Europe’s energy supply depend on a foreign country in Africa, I still see several benefits. This is a great place to promote research and development in solar thermal power. The size of the investment ($560 billion) will motivate large and small players to improve the technology and obtain economies of scale thus reducing the cost of production. And, as it has to travel over a distance of over 2000 km, it’s a good application for high-voltage direct current which reduces the transmission losses vs. traditional AC lines.
This project will certainly be a good step for solar thermal generation and will add to the objective of making renewable energy competitive vs. coal and other fossil fuels.
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