EDITOR’S LETTER


WHY SHOULD AFRICA FEED POWER TO WESTERN EUROPE?


EU’s 25 states could be produced on an area of 110 kilometres x 110 kilometres (assuming solar collectors that could capture 100% of the energy). Daniel Ayuk Mbi Egbe of the African Network for Solar Energy, comments: "Many


Africans are sceptical about Desertec,” he said.


Aidan Turnbull Editor


A plan to power Europe from Saharan solar plants seems to have stalled, but several large North


African solar


projects have still gone ahead despite local concerns. DESERTEC was a large scale project supported by a foundation of the same name and the consortium Dii (Desertec industrial initiative) created in Germany as a limited liability company (GmbH). The project aimed at creating a global renewable energy plan based on the concept of harnessing sustainable power from sites where renewable sources of energy are more abundant and transfer- ring it through high-voltage direct current transmission to consumption centres. All kinds of renewable energy sources are envisioned, but the sun-rich deserts of the world play a special role.


Energy experts suggest than an area of 3.49 million km² is potentially available for concentrating solar power (CSP) plants in the North African countries Morocco, Algeria,


Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. The amount of electricity needed by the


“Europeans make promises, but at the end of the day, they bring their engineers, they bring their equipment, and they go. It’s a new form of resource exploitation, just like in the past.” The Tunisian trade unionist Mansour Cherni made similar points at the World Social Forum 2013 held in Tunis when he asked: ‘Where will the energy produced here be used? Where will the water come from that will cool the solar power plants? And what do the locals get from it all?” But these are often regarded as political questions rather than logistical ones. The Desertec foundation is backing the


Tunur project in Tunisia, a joint venture between Nur Energy, a British-based solar developer and a group of Maltese and Tunisian investors in the oil and gas sector.


It explicitly describes itself as a large solar power export project linking the Sahara desert to Europe that will dispatch power to European consumers starting in 2018.


Given that Tunisia depends on its neigh- bour Algeria for its energy needs and that it faces increasingly frequent power cuts, it would be ‘political suicide’ for any government to proceed with exports rather than producing energy for its local markets.


the Moroccan government, with help from Dii consortium members, has attracted funding from international lenders to develop the world’s largest concentrating solar power (CSP) plant at Ourzazate.


It was originally envisioned as an export project, but failed to secure Spanish government support for an undersea cable; the project is now promoted as a means for Morocco to increase its own renewable energy supply. Energy in Africa is a scarcer commodity than in the developed world – annual consumption is 518 KWh in Sub-Saharan Africa, the same amount of electricity used by an individual in an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD example is the U.S.) country in 25 days.


Across the continent. only 10% of individuals have access to the electrical grid, and of those, 75% come from the richest two quintiles in overall income. Less than 2% of the rural populations of Malawi, Ethiopia, Niger, and Chad have access to electrical power. Electrical provisioning in Africa has generally only reached wealthy, urban middle class, and commercial sectors, bypassing the region’s large rural populations and urban poor.


According to the forum of Energy Minis-


ters of Africa, most agriculture still relies primarily on humans and animals for energy input. The electrical industry in Africa faces the economic paradox that raising prices will prohibit access to their services, but that they cannot afford to roll out additional infrastructure to drive prices down and increase access without additional capital.


Overall rates of access to energy in Africa have held constant since the 1980s, while the rest of the developing world has seen electrical grid distribution increase by 20%.


Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where per-capita access rates are falling. According to recent trends, over 60% of Sub-Saharan Africans will still lack access to electricity by 2020.


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