Executive Viewpoint
When will the Saharan sun light up the UK?
8 January 2010
During a recent interview with the Telegraph, Desertec-UK co-ordinator, Dr Gerry Wolff, said that the UK could be partly powered by the Saharan sun in as few as five years from now. CSP Today talks to Dr Gerry Wolff to find out just how the Desertec Industrial Initiative will scale the hurdles of politics, logistics and finance in such a short time-span.
By Rikki Stancich in Paris
Last year in 2009, on October 30th, a group or market leaders including ABB, Abengoa Solar, Cevital, DESERTEC Foundation, Deutsche Bank, E.ON, HSH Nordbank, MAN Solar Millennium, Munich Re, M+W Zander, RWE, Schott Solar and Siemens signed the articles of association to establish a joint venture, known as the Desertec Industrial Initiative, or the DII.
In its own words, the DII aims to develop a reliable, sustainable and climate-friendly energy supply from the deserts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
CSP Today talks to Dr Gerry Wolff, coordinator of Desertec-UK, about the challenges faced by this ambitious project in order to weigh up the DII’s chances of beating the odds – and the climate clock.
CSP Today: The CSP market faces significant hurdles in the MENA region - energy
subsidies and a lack of policies to support the commercialisation of CSP technologies ranking chief among these. How is the Desertec Industrial Initiative positioned to overcome these issues?
Gerry Wolff: A lot of things have to be sorted out. The Desertec Industrial Initiative has said it will spend 2-3 years planning, engaging with national governments, civil services and other stakeholders about the details concerning regulation, grid access and so on.
There is a lot of detail to cover but I don’t see it as presenting an insurmountable problem.
CSP Today: What level of buy-in has the project received from regional
governments - in other words, are governments in MENA considering introducing or strengthening support policies to boost renewable energy's grid share?
Gerry Wolff: Mrs Amina Benkhadra, the Minister for Energy for Morocco will be speaking in support of Desertec at a seminar which will be held in London in February next year.
At the press conference to announce the new Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII) back in July 2009, the Desertec concept was endorsed by Mrs Laila Georgy, representing the Egyptian government and by Mrs Jamila Matar, representing of the League of Arab States.
H.E Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, President of Tunisia, made a speech in Seoul endorsing the concept and Prince Hassan of Jordan has been supporting Desertec strongly for several years.
The TREC group of scientists and engineers, who originated the Desertec concept, includes several senior people from countries in MENA.
In general, there is a lot of support for Desertec right across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. There were one or two press reports about the Algerian Minister for Energy making negative comments about Desertec.
But other reports suggest thatthere is a lot of enthusiasm for Desertec amongst other people in Algeria.
CSP Today: To your knowledge, has the DII formulated a roll out strategy and if so, what will be the primary focus/area for project development?
Gerry Wolff: The DII has said that there will be a period of 2 to 3 years in which they will create detailed plans. So it is probably too early to know what their roll-out strategy will be or to know where the first projects will be established.
CSP Today: In terms of the CSP technology, have any technologies been favoured over others for any given region (ie troughs versus towers, with or without molten salt storage capacity etc). If so, for what reason?
Gerry Wolff: Again, we don’t know yet. My reading of the CSP market is that it is too early to say which technology, if any, will ”win”. It is likely that each of the several CSP technologies will have a role to play, depending on the local situation.
CSP Today: What approach is the DII likely to take to install the required transmission?
Gerry Wolff: There was an interesting article published in 2007 about electricity transmission in the US. The author, Michael Goggin, makes the following interesting point:
… our inability to build new transmission is fundamentally a public goods problem. In most regions, policies require wind plant developers that want to connect to the electric grid to pay for the full cost of an upgrade to the grid network, even though the majority of the benefits of this upgrade would accrue to millions of electricity consumers and other power plants that could piggyback on this investment. Across the country, hundreds of wind projects comprising tens of thousands of wind turbines are on hold because no one wants to step forward and pay for upgrades that will primarily benefit others.
In general, the DII and other stakeholders will need to solve this problem and avoid loading all the costs of transmission links on to individual project developers.
This could be done by sharing the costs amongst national governments. Alternatively, it could be done by some kind of private investment in which costs are recovered via charges for the use of the transmission network.
This seems to be the approach that is being followed by the investment company Imera, which has announced plans to develop a large-scale submarine supergrid in Europe.
CSP Today: On the basis of current levels of buy-in, what is the estimated time frame for realising the Desertec vision?
Gerry Wolff: The DII has announced that it expects to start delivering electricity by 2015.
This is clearly feasible since, at present, it takes 2 to 3 years to build a CSP plant. Allowing for 2 to 3 years of planning, this takes us up to about 2015.
The whole programme will extend over the 40 years up to 2050, as envisaged in the TRANS-CSP report from the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). I believe that once things are underway, the roll out could actually be a lot quicker.
People sometimes say that the estimated cost of US$400 billion for the whole programme is an awful lot of money.
But if you consider that power plants of all kinds have a life span of 30 to 40 years and that there is a continual process of replacing worn-out power plants with new ones, it is likely that at least as much money would be spent anyway between now and 2050.
The advantage of Desertec is that we would be replacing dirty power plants with clean ones.
The DLR estimates that the cost of electricity from CSP compared with electricity from fossil fuels will have a cross over point at about 2017.
After that date, the cost advantage will lie with CSP and that advantage is likely to grow.
