Desertec: The Amazing Plan to Cover Africa in Solar Panels

Simon's Social Media:

This video is #sponsored by Incogni.

Love content? Check out Simon's other YouTube Channels:

[TimoBracht_Desertec]

As a Managing Director of the Desertec Foundation, I would like to add some comments:

The solar projects back then did NOT secure funding. The mundane, boring reason why the concept is only implemented now is that there was no business case ten years ago. CSP was twice as expensive back then and PV was even more expensive at that point. The focus on sociology is an interesting ange if one considers that the fossil fuel version of a trans-mediterranean energy grid has long been implemented: North Africa provides Europe with 15 % of its gas, mostly from Algeria. Same idea, yet all non-technical concerns played little role: No terrorist attacks on pipelines took place, no disruption of supply (even during the Arab Spring), no massive protests by the local people that the gas should not be sold to Europe.
The Desertec Concept would have alleviated the dependency on mostly one country to several countries and of course eliminated the carbon emissions. Yes, still a dependency, but far better to the status quo.
Now that CSP has fallen in price to compete with gas power plants, suddenly all political issues were unimportant and our Foundation could finally convince Italy to allow Tunisia to lay an electricity cable to Europe. Egypt followed with 6 GW of electricity cables to Greece and Italy now being permitted. Whether we will achieve a total investment of 400 billion until 2050 remains to be seen :) But massive progress has been made, especially through technological innovation making it much more affordable. Small detail: Al Maktoum IV has overtaken the Al Noor Complex as the biggest CSP power plant, while showing the massive technological advances since then: Air-Cooling-Systems, massive reduction in building costs, longer storage times.

The concerns about water are obviously very important to us as a non-profit organization, that being one of the reasons why we are very careful to endorse hydrogen projects, which have an even bigger water consumption. Luckily the issue has been resolved with CSP. Cooling is now done with air-coolers, meaning that water is no longer needed for cooling.

@Simon Whistler @megaprojects9649 Feel free to contact us for news about the current projects. Happy to give out information on current progress.

[ignitionfrn]

1:10 - Mid roll ads
2:45 - Chapter 1 - Early concepts
5:40 - Chapter 2 - The brains behind the operation
10:05 - Chapter 3 - A place in the sun
14:45 - Chapter 4 - A composite failure

[jackvos]

They're planning on doing something similar in Australia for Singapore. Australia - Asia Power Link.
I think that would be a good follow up video to this one.

[brendenrathgeber]

Thank you for making another one on infrastructure. Those are my favorites. I work in the energy industry and love these types of videos

[schemage]

You know it's ironic, people deemed the Desertec project too risky in terms of holding European electricity to ransom. And yet, that is exactly what happened with those Gulf Stream pipelines, when Russia thought they could leverage oil exports to prevent European support for Ukraine. Where was the commentary that over dependence on Russia could be "problematic"???

[Killdozer]

The main problem is energy transmission. These lines, like from Morocco to Spain, cost enormous money an we need like 70 of them. Turns out, despite the fact that solar panel in Germany is about 3 times less effective, than in northern Africa, it's cheaper than all the things related to transmission of this energy from Africa.

[WORLDCRUSHER]

ignoring the technical challenges, the whole thing would be looted and stripped bare almost immediately due to the systemic poverty and instability of the region

[collectifission]

On the Noor I to III combined output: I had to relisten a few times since you misspoke, but 1470 GWh (not gigawatts per hour, mind you) for $9 billion is actually very expensive. A typical 1 GWe nuclear power plant costs about the same and produces six times more electricity.

[adamredwine]

We have a CSP plant in Israel. It works but apparently it produces less energy than they had expected and the thing is so bright that you literally can't look at it if you are closer than a couple of kilometers. Honestly, it's brightness is the biggest problem.

[emeraldfinder]

Yes! Another Simon video, I already know why this didn’t happen, but I’m going to watch anyway

[wagnerrp]

@14:05 While this design might have used standard steam turbines, but they don’t need to. Brayton cycle turbines are dry, and you can run the bottoming distillation plant on a dry cooling tower. The main use of water would be for cleaning, and that could be supplied by the distillation plant.

[MyGodZach]

Few details were left out here, I was working back in the day with a startup in Orange county which was involved in the project, first of all the Germans at the end tried to make the north African countries invest themselves then buy the electricity from em which was weird for such projects, also Tunisia pulled out, then Libya became a non option because of the war raging there at the time, and then Algeria have strict laws on how foreign countries use their natural resources and soil but also if I remember they required the solar panels and stuff must be produced locally, then came Morocco but here again there was a problem, the suggested location was in the disputed Western Sahara territory and that means the saharaui people must consent first if any European company plans implementing there, again dead-end, thats most of the things I remember, the sad part is Europe will only try to exploit Africa in the cheapest way possible.

[CarltonTweedle]

One very big question where are they going to get the water to clean them?

[warrenjohnknight.]

The possibilities of heat reflecting, might be a problem, mind you maintenance will be absolutely unbelievable 😳.

[ME-keqc]

another project that will never come to pass

[AzMedic]

One thing I am very curious about is how would they protect all those solar reflectors from sandstorms.

[Thomas-VA]

layered mixture of technologies, to suppliment the needs of the facility and the questions of immediate storage to long term use of, use right now what you can, store what you can, take advantage of the multiple sources not just the singular and have a good day

[MaxxHydr]

Security would be constant consideration. I have seen random theft of solar panels from small rural electrification projects in Sub-Saharan Africa ruin government projects.

[kennystrawnmusic]

Honestly surprised that no one has thought of using CSP not to melt salt but to power a giant SPIL (solar-pumped iodine laser) that would in turn serve as an ICF ignition source.

All you'd need to do at that point is rapidly add some deuterium, tritium, and/or helium-3 to the already-ignited fusion reaction once it gets going (most conveniently this would be by forming a FRC around the ICF pellet) and you'd have a perfect solution to the intermittency problem.

[MaverickBlue]

All they had to do was design the project in stages, start smaller like the Morocco plant focussed on a single grid connection, and then build out additional plants and interconnects gradually over time, focussing on the most viable areas first.