Solar power, whether cooking the mud-baked bricks that built some of the earliest civilizations, or powering cars through the American Midwest, has always had one major drawback—it doesn’t work when the sun’s not out. 

Many solutions have been devised to overcome this disadvantage. Satellites could be placed in orbit to catch sunlight from outside the atmosphere and beam it down to earth in concentrated microwaves. The Solar Two project stored energy captured during the day in molten salts, and rechargeable batteries are generally used by hobbyists and non-utility solar users. But the most cost efficient method so far appears to be just assembling solar arrays in areas where it’s nearly always sunny. 

With that in mind, a group in the European Union is mulling the creation of a massive solar collector farm, built across the Mediterranean Sea in the Sahara Desert. A massive, sun-bleached expanse of open land, the Sahara is an ostensibly ideal location for a solar power generator. Its near-equatorial location also provides it a far better angle at which to absorb the sun’s rays, allowing it to function far more efficiently than similar arrays at higher latitudes. A 2002 study concluded that such an array would yield electricity at a cost of 5.3 cents per kilowatt hour, well below average domestic American electricity rates.   

While the idea of a desert solar array is nothing especially new, this latest project aims to evade some of the technical challenges facing similar projects by using simpler CSP collectors, which concentrate light onto tubes of water, instead of converting electronically as a photovoltaic cell would. To transfer the energy to mainland Europe, the group also plans to use high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission, which minimizes transmission losses over distances to around three percent per 1000 kilometers.

While there are still some technical challenges to overcome, namely conversion of the HVDC electricity to the alternating current that runs across the existing European power grid, the project has potential to supply almost the entire European continent with reliable, clean energy, albeit with a massive—but attainable—initial investment. 

If history is any guide, however, extreme care should be taken to involve the independent governments in the Sahara region, within whose boundaries the project is planned. More than 70 years ago, modernized nations stumbled across another massive, accessible energy source in an arid, developing region of the world, and it’s safe to say that exploitive practices in that region could lead to more than a few negative, unintended consequences.

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Photo by Flickr user Bachmont