Vast farms of solar panels in the Sahara could provide clean electricity for the whole of Europe, according to EU scientists working on a plan to pool the region's renewable energy.
Harnessing the power of the desert sun is at the centre of an ambitious scheme to build a €45bn (£35.7bn) European supergrid that would allow countries across the continent to share electricity from abundant green sources such as wind energy in the UK and Denmark, and geothermal energy from Iceland and Italy.
The idea is gaining political support in Europe, with Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, recently backing the north African solar plan.
Because the sunlight is more intense, solar photovoltaic panels in north Africa could generate up to three times the electricity compared with similar panels in northern Europe.
Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission's Institute for Energy explained how electricity produced in solar farms in Africa, each generating around 50-200 megawatts of power, could be fed thousands of miles to European countries. The proposed grid would use high-voltage direct current (DC) transmission lines, which lose less energy over distance than conventional alternating current (AC) lines.
The idea of developing solar farms in the Mediterranean region and north Africa was given a boost by Sarkozy earlier this month when he highlighted solar farms in north Africa as central to the work of his newly formed Mediterranean Union.
Depending on the size of the grid, building the necessary high-voltage lines across Europe could cost up to €1bn a year every year till 2050, but Jaeger-Walden pointed out that the figure was small when compared to a recent prediction by the International Energy Agency that the world needs to invest more than $45tn (£22.5tn) in energy systems over the next 30 years
