BERLIN, Oct. 27 (UPI)
Deserts in the Middle East and North Africa can help meet Europe's and the region's growing electricity demand, according to two German research reports. Some may say the deserts are areas that don't yield any benefits to humanity -- but that's not quite true; the solar rays that burn all day onto the Sahara and the likes can be converted into energy -- a lot of energy.
Every year, the sun beams as much solar energy onto the area as the amount of oil needed to cover the desert with a sea 10 inches deep.
"That's a huge energy potential," Franz Trieb, of the Institute of Technical Thermodynamics at the German Aerospace Center, and author of the two studies, Friday told United Press International in a telephone interview. "And against what some say, you wouldn't have to pave the entire desert -- one thousandth of the entire desert area in the region would be enough."
Across southern Europe and deserts in North Africa and the Middle East, a series of solar thermal power plants, which use mirrors to collect sunrays during the day and generate electricity at night, could supply as much as 15 percent of Europe's electricity needs by 2050, Trieb said.
The studies strongly support switching to renewable energy sources for Europe's electricity generation of the future, and they advise governments to take similar measures to Spain and Germany; both countries have a solar energy feed-in tariff.
The renewable plan for the region includes -- aside from the solar plants in southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East -- hydropower plants in Scandinavia, wind energy plants off the North European coast and biomass and hydropower plants in mainland Europe.
"Our studies have found that it is absolutely untrue that renewables can't meet the basic electricity demand," Trieb said. "No single renewable energy source can, but they are able to provide our basic demands of electricity in a wide mix." The existing network of fossil fuel power plants would then simply support the renewable energy mix of the future.
Electricity generated from renewable energy sources is still more expensive than power from fossil fuels, and that prevents investors from putting their dollars into the technologies -- the wrong approach, Trieb said.
Making the cost of renewable energy equivalent to fossil fuels before the year 2020 would take an investment of $75 billion, but that investment will be returned quickly, as the region would save $250 billion by 2050 when compared with a "business as usual policy scenario."
So who should pay?
"If the initial investment would be equally distributed among all electricity consumers in the region, each of them would have to afford additionally $10 per year for electricity payments for a period of 15 years in order to finance the total market introduction of renewables," the study found. "After those 15 years, all consumers will benefit from stable and low electricity costs."
The required amount is comparable to money spent developing and building the first commercial nuclear fusion reactor, which is expected in 2050, the study says. By that time, that plant will not have reduced CO2 emission, while the renewable energy mix will have avoided 28 billion tons of CO2 emissions.
Trieb said renewables, in the long run, will be far cheaper than fossil fuels. "The more you use the renewable technology, the cheaper it gets because of mass production and learning effects, while its is exactly the other way round with fossil fuels," he said.
In the case of the solar plants in Africa and the Middle East, the excess heat produced could be used for other projects important to the region, such as water desalination, the studies say.
First of all, Trieb said, the solar plants in North Africa and the Middle East should be used to satisfy that region's own electricity hunger, which by 2050 will be as big as Europe's.
"The electricity first and foremost is for the North African and Middle Eastern states," Trieb said. But after a decade or so, the sheer mass of energy could enable those states to sell cheap electricity to Europe, Trieb said, which -- in the best of all cases -- provides the poorer African states with additional income.
"It would be great if the whole project had a stabilizing effect, socially and economically, for the African states."
Trieb said North African and Middle Eastern states have already warmed up to the idea, and in Spain, a solar thermal power plant with a capacity of 50 megawatts is currently under construction.
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