Sahara sun 'could power all of Europe'

By Laura Clout
Last Updated: 12:01pm BST 23/07/2008

A series of huge solar farms in the Sahara could supply the whole of Europe with clean electricity, EU scientists claimed yesterday.

Through harnessing the power of the desert sun and feeding it into a European electricity supergrid, CO2 emissions could be slashed, they say.

The Sahara desert sun could produce enough energy to meet all of Europe's electricity needs, scientists say
Speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission's Institute for Energy said all of Europe's energy needs could be met by capturing just 0.3 per cent of the sunlight falling on the Sahara and Middle East deserts.The solar farms would produce electricity either through photovoltaic cells, or by concentrating the intense desert heat to boil water and drive turbines.
This, along with power from other renewable sources, such as wind or geothermal, would be fed into a 5,000-mile electricity supergrid, stretching from Siberia to Morocco and Egypt to Iceland.
The grid proposal, which has won the backing of Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy, answers the most frequent criticism levelled at renewable power - that it is uneconomic because of the unpredictability of the weather.
Supporters argue that by drawing power from wind and solar farms across a large swathe of Europe, there will always be power generated somewhere.

Forming the main arteries of the supergrid would be high voltage direct current (DC) lines. These leak less energy over long distances than traditional alternating current (AC) lines and are three times as efficient.
Scientists argue that because north African sunlight is more intense, solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in the Sahara could generate up to three times the electricity produced by similar panels in northern Europe.
Mr Jaeger-Walden said that the cost of energy could be bought down for consumers by building large solar farms.
"The biggest PV system at the moment is installed in Leipzig and the price of the installation is €3.25 per watt," he said.
"If we could realise that in the Mediterranean, for example in southern Italy, this would correspond to electricity prices in the range of 15 cents per kWh, something below what the average consumer is paying."
However, before the plan could help the EU meet its target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020, much time and investment is needed, the scientists working on the project say.
But they estimate that with an investment of around €450bn (£356bn) it could produce 100 GW by 2050, more than the combined electricity output from all sources in Britain.