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The Dark Side of Solar Energy: Energy Imperialism 2.0

Oil well fires, some set on purpose during the Gulf War of the early 1990s, released massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere.

During the last days of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein set fire to scores of oil wells in the deserts of Kuwait as his forces retreated into Iraq. The fires burned for months and released prodigious amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. In 1993, the U.S. Army Missile Command in Redstone, Alabama conducted a classified study of Saudi Arabia’s solar-energy resources, which evaluated the impact of sulfur dioxide on atmospheric conditions and solar radiation. The results were unambiguous - Saudi Arabia is the Saudi Arabia of solar energy.

Saudi Arabia’s Solar-Energy Resources

Saudi Arabia sits on the eastern edge of the so-called Sun Belt, which stretches across the deserts of northern Africa and the Persian Gulf. Sunlight fuels life on Earth. If solar energy is the future, Saudi Arabia and the nations of the Sun Belt will enjoy a disproportionate pie of the world’s energy resources tomorrow as much as they do today. An energy-starved Europe is salivating over the prospect of harvesting those solar-energy resources.

While speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona today, one of Europe’s leading energy authorities, Arnulf Jaeger-Walden, pointed out that less than 0.4% of the solar energy that falls on the deserts of Northern Africaand the Middle East would satisfy all of Europe’s energy needs.  Jaeger-Walden is hardly the only person in Europe who has thought about this. England’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared support for an ambitious plan to harvest solar energy from the Saharan desert in North Africa and, to a limited extent, the Middle East.

Spain & Northwestern Africa’s Solar-Energy Resources

Exploiting Africa’s and the Persian Gulf’s solar-energy resources is practically the raison d’etre for “Union for the Mediterranean,” an European initiative aimed at expanding relations with North Africa and the Middle East. Indeed, the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC) has become a central goal of the Union and has given concrete form to the new energy imperialism in the so-called DESERTEC Concept.

“The DESERTEC Concept . . . proposes that the regions of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (EU-MENA) begin to cooperate in the production of electricity and desalinated water using concentrating solar thermal power plants and wind turbines in the MENA deserts. These technologies can supply the growing demands for power and seawater desalination in the MENA region, and produce clean electrical power that can be transmitted via High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission lines to Europe (with overall transmission losses of about 10-15%).”

TREC has colloborated with the Club of Rome, which advocated for limits on population growth in the 1970s. The map of the proposed supergrid of transmission lines carrying solar-energy harvested in African and Middle-Eastern deserts to Europe looks like this:

DESERTEC’s Proposed SuperGrid

Although DESERTEC describes itself as a global initiative, it belongs first and foremost to the European Union. Here is how the initiative describes its aims.

1. The solar energy available in deserts is more than 700 times the present global primary energy consumption. This is far more than needed to replace fossil fuels.
2. Solar thermal power plants can store solar heat and generate solar power according to demand, also at night (secured capacity).
3. Technologies for power production and long-distance transmission to over 90% of world population are at hand.
4. In a solar energy co-operation technology-belt and sun-belt can achieve energy, water and climate security, and stable power production costs of 4 – 8 c$/kWh.
5. Investments into mining technologies for fossil fuels will accelerate their depletion and boost climate change, while better solar technology will be beneficial for all future.
6. An Apollo-like program for bringing deserts into service for energy, water and climate security, as proposed by Prince El Hassan from Jordan at the Hanover Industrial Fair 2006, could be organized immediately.
7. TREC and The Club of Rome are calling for a conference DESERTEC to bring technology- and sun-belt countries to action.
8. Solar energy from deserts can give energy security to the world, and it can stop the ongoing devastation of the Earth by fossil fuels.

See Global energy and climate security through solar power from deserts.

To make matters still more frightening, TREC has recently spawned a sibling to the solar-energy initiative which seeks to harvest wind power from the Sahara Desert.