Wake-up call for energy dream

Political realities have stalled an ambitious plan, involving more than 50 big companies, to resolve both poverty and climate change. The grand vision may be on hold, but piecemeal projects are still going ahead.

Political realities have forced Desertec, the planned €400 billion renewable energy network for the Mediterranean, to scale down its immediate goals. Marcelo del Pozo / Reuters

Nobody could accuse Desertec, an institution backed by more than 50 international companies, of lacking ambition. It hopes to resolve two of the world's most intractable problems in one go - poverty and climate change.

It would start with solar panels in the Sahara and end in European households, bringing electricity to one of the world's major consumers and money to those most in need.

But political realities have forced Desertec, the planned €400 billion (Dh2.08 trillion) renewable energy network for the Mediterranean, to scale down its immediate goals. Regional instability has shaken the Middle East and made it trickier to seal the government support and attract the international investors that will be needed before the first kilowatt of electricity can journey beneath the sea.

"I can't predict the future. I believe from a technical point these things are viable, these technologies are available to do it," says Dietmar Siersdorfer, the regional head of energy at Siemens, the German multinational that is one of Desertec's main backers.

"Political barriers are at the moment there, yes. We see all the political unrest here in the region. We have to see what will happen to that here and how we can develop out of the scenario in the future."

Companies such as Siemens are backing Desertec by lending their names and contributing amounts from €75,000 to €150,000 a year to an industrial consortium called Dii. (Desertec is the name of the concept; Dii is its industrial arm.)

The initial planners pictured a completely integrated network from Egypt to Morocco connected through multiple high-voltage lines to Europe. Now Dii is focusing on smaller projects in individual nations. The first is in Morocco, where Dii has signed an agreement with a public-private agency to help it to find government partners for a solar plant.

In Tunisia, Dii is studying the political, economic and technical needs of large-scale renewable energy installations, and in Egypt and Algeria it has begun talks to woo government partners.

Dii says its focus through the end of next year is to lay the framework for a long-term development plan for a transcontinental network stretching into 2050.

Supporters say the European backlash against nuclear power and the rise of democracy in parts of North Africa will give impetus to the plan, along with the EU's target to draw 20 per cent of its energy from renewables within the next decade.

"Right now there are some revolutionaries in Libya and there are struggling times in Tunisia. But we are confident that in the end it will work out," says Martin Pack, a spokesman for RWE, a German utility backing Dii. The revolutions in Tunisia and Libya will slow but not stop the project, he says.

"From the beginning we said it will be a long-run project to 2050. Right now what we are doing is talking to the governments of North Africa to see if they like the concept of Desertec - they do - and to talk to the state electricity companies to make joint ventures with them."

But if Desertec wants to make its vision a reality, there are two more obstacles to overcome.

The first is putting down the power lines to transmit power between North African nations - potentially allowing them to draw on supply at different peak hours - as well as across the Mediterranean and up through Europe. Spain is likely to be a transit point for much of the energy travelling from North Africa to Europe because of its location. But currently it does not have enough room in its power lines to export as much of its own electricity as it would like to its neighbours, says Isidoro Tapia Ramirez, the general secretary of Spain's renewable energy agency.

"Unless we increase the interconnection grid with France, Portugal and the rest of Europe, we cannot absorb the production," says Mr Tapia, adding that Spain is already increasing its transmission capacity to France by half.

"We are on the cusp of increasing it, but we need to have more access to the European market. For us it's a long-term plan that has to be developed in parallel."

The second obstacle is more basic - dust.

As far as solar technology has come in recent years, it has yet to solve the question of how to clean panels in an efficient way so that they can capture as much energy from the sun as possible.

"There are a lot of open questions - whether that scale of investment really is too risky at this stage knowing there are a lot of unknowns - but I think that its potential is huge," says Adnan Amin, the director general of the International Renewable Energy Agency, the UN body to promote renewables.

"Common interests makes for strange bedfellows. When countries have common interest, there's a supplier of energy, there's a consumer of energy, whatever their political opinions, the practicalities … will make for cooperative arrangements."