North Africa’s Solar Energy Future

You may remember as a young child playing with a magnifying glass on a sunny day frying ants, burning holes in paper, or even starting a fire, much to you parent’s horror. Concentrating solar power (CSP) works essentially the same way as your magnifying glass. In a CSP solar energy field, a series of parabolic mirrors capture and focus the suns energy, just like a magnifying glass, on special receiving pipes, heating up oil inside. The hot oil runs through a heat exchanger creating steam that in turn powers an electrical generator. The spent steam is condensed in a cooling tower and runs back to the heat exchangers to repeat the process. To keep the power plant running all night, part of the plant's solar capacity is used to store heat energy in molten salt for generating steam after the sun goes down. High voltage direct current lines are given the job of transmitting electricity to distant markets because their energy loss is only about 3 percent every 1,000 kilometers, much less than alternating current lines. Concentrating solar plants come in a variety of configurations including flat mirrors focused on a tower and mirrors arrayed in a dish focused on a central generating unit, but the most widely used technology is parabolic trough mirrors capable of tracking the sun.

CSP is the wave of the energy future for North Africa and the Middle East and by extension for deserts everywhere in the eyes of both the World Bank and DESERTEC, an international foundation devoted to the goal of producing clean energy from the world’s deserts. A possible solar future is laid out for five countries, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan, in the World Bank's publication, “Middle East and North Africa Region Assessment of Local Manufacturing Potential for Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) Projects.” This is a bureaucratic mouthful, but the study is must-reading for anyone who wants to learn about the potential of solar energy in hot desert landscapes. 

CSP is a tried, although not quite yet true, technology in terms of its cost competitiveness, with plants operating in the U.S., Spain, Morocco, Egypt, and elsewhere. Currently, CSP can’t match the low production costs of coal-fired power plants, but this will happen in the future as industry-wide scale economies and the technology learning curve that accompanies them are realized. CSP produces electricity currently at 0.14-0.18 Euros per kilowatt hour (KWh), but by the time 5 gigawatts (GW) of capacity is installed worldwide, this cost should fall to 0.08-0.12 Euros, which will be within shooting distance of the current average of 0.10 Euros per KWh for coal in Europe. Right now 2 GW of CSP capacity is either installed or under construction globally and another 12 GW is on the drawing boards. Utilities in Europe that burn coal today are required to purchase carbon emission allowances, which now sell for around 10 Euros per metric ton. This adds about 0.01 Euros to the cost per KWh which will rise after 2013 when emissions caps in Europe are tightened and the costs of allowances is projected to increase beyond 30 Euros per metric ton, boosting coal-fired costs to 0.13 Euros per KWh.  At this point CSP will look better than coal as a long-term source for European electrical energy.  

In North African, CSP will not only provide a secure and economical source of energy, but will also be a substantial employment generator for both the export and domestic energy markets. Under a scenario of aggressive growth in CSP capacity, the World Bank predicts that installed capacity will reach 5 GW by 2020 and will grow to 14.5 GW by 2025. 

The recently completed construction of a hybrid CSP and natural gas plant at Kuraymat, Egypt, 90 miles south of Cairo, offers a preview of possible job opportunities. Of the 150 MW total capacity, the CSP portion will deliver 20-25 MW. Roughly 60 percent of the total project value for the solar portion flowed to local businesses who undertook site preparation and construction, provided the mounting structure, tubes, electrical cables, and carried out grid connections, engineering, and procurement. Local businesses and utility employees benefit permanently from carrying out the plant's operations and ongoing maintenance. The components unavailable locally and imported for Kuraymat included mirrors, the receiver, heat transfer fluid, and the steam generator. As the North African CSP market expands, some portion of these components can probably be produced locally, particularly mirrors and receivers. The Egyptian glass industry has grown both in capacity and sophistication in recent years and could become a future supplier of parabolic mirrors. Egyptian companies today not only manufacture the high-quality clear glass required for CSP mirrors, but are also able to bend glass into parabolic shapes and to coat it with a protective shield to defend against desert blowing sands. The suppliers of power generating equipment, such as General Electric and Siemens, have unmatchable specialized production experience that can’t be duplicated locally, and such equipment will have to be imported as will molten salt heat storage facilities whose production is also highly specialized. Plant design will also be a global affair, but the supply of domestic engineering talent will expand as local educational institutions ramp up programs in solar technologies. A potentially important, but tough to document, spillover effect of a more technologically sophisticated local population will be innovation and employment creation in an array of related economic arenas. Knowledge begets new ideas, and new ideas beget new ways of making a living.

For the North Africa-Middle East region, the World Bank forecasts the creation of 34,000 CSP-related permanent jobs by 2020 under its aggressive expansion alternative and 64,000-79,000 permanent jobs by 2025. These include both operation and maintenance employment and a permanent manufacturing and construction workforce to feed a continuous expansion of CSP for both the local and European market. This projection is based on achieving an installed capacity of 5 GW by 2020 and another 2 GW in equipment exports, and 14.5 GW installed by 2025 plus 5.2 GW of equipment exports. The job creation figures don’t include multiplier effects that will lead to employment increases in the larger local economy. Newly hired workers will inject some portion of their new found income into the local economy as consumer spending which will in turn further expand employment and create still more income and spending. A multiplier effect of 1.5 times the initial CSP employment creation is not out of the question. Some North African countries, such as Egypt, possess significant oil and gas reserves, but the employment rate per unit energy is much less in fossil fuel than solar, and these reserves will ultimately be depleted while solar energy will be renewed daily as long as the sun shines. A solar future looks much better than continued reliance on fossil fuels.

Bringing solar power to the North African desert will be a huge undertaking requiring an unparalleled volume of social coordination and invention. The social entrepreneurship needed will exceed the capacity of any single business enterprise and will call for a coordinated effort that can be met only by governmental and nongovernment organizations. We don’t normally think of not-for-profit enterprises, either within or outside of government, as being entrepreneurial, but reality needn’t always accord with popular perception as we will now suggest.

The DESERTEC Foundation is one of those nongovernment organizations (NGOs) that just might make a difference in the world’s energy future. Rather than retire and head for the golf course, Dr. Gerhard Knies, an expert in particle physics who spent his research career at such institutions as CERN and the University of of California-Berkeley, founded in 2003 the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation, a network of experts in renewable energy. This organization in turn created the DESERTEC Foundation in 2009 to promote the development of solar energy in desert landscapes. The Foundation encourages academic research and training programs in renewable energy throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, pushes cooperative research programs with private businesses interested in renewable energy, and sets up programs with businesses to facilitate specific projects such as wind energy in Morocco and a 2 Gigawatt Concentrating Solar plant in the Tunisian desert.

Our energy future according to the thinkers at DESERTEC lies in the sun-drenched desert wastelands of the world. Hot deserts receive so much solar energy annually that no more than 1 percent of their 36 million square kilometers would be needed to replace present-day global fossil fuel energy consumption. Primary global energy consumption from fossil fuels currently equals 107,000 Terrawatt hours (TWh) a year, and a kilometer of hot desert receives 2.2 TWh of solar energy annually, of which 0.33 TWh can be captured at a presently attainable 15 percent electricity conversion rate. Even if total fossil fuel energy demand ultimately doubles, which exceeds current projections for the next half-century, no more than 2 percent of desert landscapes would be needed for solar energy production under the radical assumption that all of our fossil-fuel replacing energy comes from deserts. 

The experts at DESERTEC favor solar thermal technology, such as concentrating solar power (CSP) as opposed to photovoltaics, which generate electricity only when the sun shines. As we already know, solar thermal plants can collect heat energy in the daytime and store it for use at night, allowing around-the-clock electrical energy production. A drawback of solar thermal technology is its potential to disturb the ecology of certain sensitive desert landscapes. Some deserts, such as the Sonoran and Mohave in the U.S., contain threatened species, but avoiding the destruction of rare habitat seems reasonable under a solar energy regime through careful placement of solar thermal facilities given the huge amount amount of desert landscape available worldwide. In sensitive habitats, photovoltaic panels may be the better technology to use because they needn't be installed in the more disturbing large scale facilities typical of solar thermal. Solar panels can be tucked in along exists roads and power lines without doing much damage. At some point in the future using daytime solar energy to produce hydrogen through electrolysis will become cost effective which can then be stored and used for 24-hour electricity generation. Hydrogen powered fuel cells that produce electric energy have a variety of potential applications including running motor vehicles or supplying electricity on demand. 

In the near term, a clean energy future for Europe and the Mediterranean Basin includes a substantial role for concentrating solar-based energy production (CSP) from the deserts of North Africa. DESERTEC projects an installed CSP capacity in North Africa by 2050 of 400 GW with 100 of that serving the European energy market. Using the World Bank’s projection of 25 one-year local jobs per MW of installed capacity, this means that an average of 250,000 manufacturing and construction jobs per year would need between 2011 and 2050 to reach 400 GW of installed capacity. To permanently maintain 400 GW of capacity after 2050, including end-of-life equipment replacement, will require approximately 320,000 permanent jobs, based on studies of existing thermal solar plants. With a continuous growth of CSP in North Africa of 4 GW annually, CSP employment will reach 570,000 by 2050, and continue to grow slowly after that. This will be a substantial addition of jobs for the North African labor force, which is currently about 60 million for the CSP-coalition countries. 

Big solar energy projects in the North African desert have gone beyond the abstract discussion phase and are now coming into reality. One of the most ambitious of these is the proposed TuNur CSP plant to be located in the southern Tunisian desert. TuNur, a DESERTEC supported project, will deliver 2,000 megawatts of energy into the Italian electrical grid through a direct current high energy line under the Mediterranean beginning in 2016. TuNur is a joint venture between British solar developer, Nur Energie, and a Tunisian company, Top Oilfield Services, and will use a system of large mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy on solar towers to heat molten salt that in turn generates steam to run electric generators continuously day and night. By recycling the steam, water inputs to the system will be minimal and the impact on the desert landscape modest. Total investment in the project will be nearly $10 billion, and 20,000 local jobs will be created in mirror fabrication, plant construction, and maintenance. On completion, TuNur will be the largest solar energy project in the world. Top Oilfield Services’ bread and butter in the past has been servicing the petroleum industry, but ironically its future looks to be in desert-based solar where its desert experience will be a special advantage. If TuNur succeeds, it will train a generation of Tunisian engineers and technicians in solar energy and set the foundation for a new source of employment in the country’s future.  

To think about clean and green economic development on such a huge scale as DESERTEC’s vision for a solar future can be mind boggling. In reality, creating a compact green economy in North Africa and elsewhere will involve an accumulation of many different approaches and technologies and the work of all sorts of entrepreneurs, social and otherwise, at a range of scales. For small scale options, take a look at posts here on Schaduf and KarmSolar.