CAIRO (UPI) — The first phase of the world’s most ambitious solar power project is to get under way in Morocco in early 2012 and is likely to extend to Algeria and Tunisia.
The Desertec Industrial Initiative, the German-led consortium behind the $549 billion carbon-free project, announced in Cairo Wednesday that “all systems are go in Morocco.”
The plan is to use vast arrays of solar panels across the Sahara Desert to harness the rays of the sun, which shines there virtually all year round, to produce steam to drive turbines that will generate electricity for the region through an envisioned supergrid that would supply 15-20 percent of Europe’s requirements.
Because North Africa’s sunlight is much more intense than that in Europe, solar photovoltaic panels used by the Desertec project could generate up to three times the electricity that similar projects in northern Europe produce.
Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European Commission’s Institute for Energy, has said it requires only 0.3 percent of the sunlight falling on the Sahara and other Middle Eastern deserts to provide all of Europe’s energy needs.
