The Sahara Desert, particularly the North Africa region, is one of the largest untapped sources of energy on the planet. The sunlight here has the potential to provide energy for the entire world.
A 1 square meter solar panel installed in Algeria can generate between 5 to 7 kWh of electricity each day, which is three times more than in Germany. When scaled up to 1000 km2, this translates to 5 to 7 billion kWh of energy produced daily, nearly fulfilling the entire electricity demand of Europe. And simply multiplying that by ten would suffice to power the whole world.
These impressive figures are frequently reiterated. This rough calculation seems to have opened a new vision for humanity. Numerous projects have been proposed to turn these simple equations into reality, but the reality is that the situation is not as easy as it seems.
Solar farm.
High Infrastructure Costs
Currently, there are only two transmission lines connecting North Africa to Europe, transmitting electricity from Morocco to Spain. Each line can carry 700 MW. A third transmission line is planned to be built before 2030, increasing the total capacity to 2100 MW.
If we want to transmit enough electricity to Europe, temporarily overlooking transmission losses and energy storage issues, we would need an additional 592 to 831 similar transmission lines. However, these are not merely cables strung from one country to another; they involve highly expensive and complex infrastructure. The third line connecting Morocco and Spain is expected to cost around 150 million USD. Multiplying this by 592 gives us approximately 8.9 billion USD. But this is just the shortest and cheapest route connecting North Africa to Europe. To build an actual network, longer transmission lines are necessary to connect Tunisia to northern Italy, Libya to Greece, Turkey, and many other locations.
High Voltage Transmission Losses
Desertec was a project led by Germany with an investment of up to half a trillion USD aimed at constructing power plants and transmission infrastructure across North Africa and the Middle East. This project focused on transmitting high voltage alternating current over short distances (such as from Morocco to Spain) and high voltage direct current over longer distances.
Over each kilometer, high voltage direct current suffers less loss compared to high voltage alternating current. However, converting the alternating current network in the region to long-distance alternating current transmission lines requires very expensive transformers and converters. The transmission lines from Morocco to Spain only span 28 kilometers, so this is not a significant issue, but transmitting high voltage direct current from Tunisia to Italy with minimal loss presents a challenging problem.
Concerns Due to Regional Instability
Many investors are hesitant to invest in the unstable countries of North Africa. For instance, in 2013, there was an attack on a gas facility belonging to British Petroleum in Algeria. This facility is an important economic resource for the country, yet it is isolated in a vast desert. The area is known as a transit hub for Al-Qaeda in North Africa. Thus, it easily becomes an attractive target for attacks that are difficult to protect. For this reason, some countries, such as Germany, have opted to produce photovoltaic energy domestically instead of investing in power stations in North Africa. By 2020, photovoltaics accounted for 10% of the country’s electricity production.
Desertification and water scarcity make it difficult for African countries to harness solar power.
A Massive Water Requirement
Things become even more challenging when considering the amount of water that power plants need for cooling, running steam turbines, and cleaning solar mirrors.
The Ouarzazate solar power plant in Morocco uses 2.5 to 3 billion liters of water annually, sourced from a dam located 12 kilometers away. Morocco is prone to drought, so if fulfilling Europe’s electricity demand requires diverting water from farms that sustain the Moroccan population, it becomes a significant challenge. Meanwhile, North Africa is one of the regions most severely affected by climate change, with desertification and water scarcity worsening.
While solar energy projects may superficially seem to bring many economic benefits to North Africa, they actually extract considerable resources from countries already disadvantaged geographically.
