Craig Morris just posted this nonsense. He really did:

Over the weekend, Deutsche Welle published a report that went almost unnoticed – the Desertec project “has been shelved.” Yet, when the project was announced, there was a lot of attention.

Of course, the Deutsche Welle article cited by Morris does not say “Desertec has been shelved”. He really should consider removing this misleading statement from his article. The article at Deutsche Welle, while trying hard to make Desertec look bad, actually reports that construction at Ourzazate has started. All the author of that piece says is that probably most of the electricity from that project will be consumed in Morocco, instead of being sold to the European Union.

If some day this kind of misleading statement was actually true, one would need to source it from Desertec or from the Desertec industrial initiative. I just checked their websites. It is a complete fabrication to assert that they have shelved the project.

Looking at the DII website, one notices that, quite on the contrary, the latest news is that the project at Ourzazate just launched construction.

Update: After some discussion on Twitter, I get the impression that Morris did not want to say “Desertec has been shelved”. He wanted to say something like “some projects in Morocco won’t deliver electricity from desert sites to Europe, but use the electricity themselves instead”. He also wrote that he actually likes power from the desert, as long as it is used for the people living there.

Still “Desertec is shelved” is rather different than “there will be no electricity transmissions from Morocco”.

As to this latter point, that will be just a question of market forces once the connections are there (there is already a small connection between Spain and Morocco, but there will be more of the same in the future). Having a larger area of the network will help stability of supply and be in the economic interest of everybody involved. There is no reason to artificially restrict access to the EU electricity market for African states.

It is much too early to say anything about how that will play out. We need to build some massive desert capacity first before we can see where it will be used.

The “Clean Energy Ministerial” is an informal cooperation project where once a year energy ministers of the major industrialized countries meet. Topics are renewable energy, energy efficiency, and access to energy.

This year’s meeting just finished in India. The Clean Energy Ministerial has a dedicated website, and they give some information about the results on their blog, in a post titled “World Energy Leaders Take Action On Clean Energy”. Next year Korea will host the conference.

I have looked at the blog post and some PDF files providing background information. But as far as I can tell, they didn’t even discuss energy from the desert. That is unfortunate. This kind of forum would be exactly the right place to discuss how to get these large-scale international projects up to speed.

That said, there were a couple of interesting highlights.

For one, they are sponsoring a competition for energy efficient technology. This year, television screens were the object of the competition. Samsung won. That means that they can now use that fact in their advertising efforts. More people will buy Samsung television screens and use less electricity as a result.

Next up is a competition for the most efficient electric motor. As I learned from their releases, actually 43% of the World’s electricity is used by motors. So this makes sense as a target for the next step.

They have also released a “Global Electric Vehicle Outlook”. See this report at CleanProgress.

As a result of this initiative, a global quality standard and test method for solar LED lanterns has been published in April of this year.

All of which is nice, but there really should be some discussion on Desertec in this forum.

Paul Gipe just posted an article looking back at his three decades of renewable advocacy titled “100 Percent Renewable Vision Building”.

In that article Gipe describes how reality has performed much better than what was expected decades ago. And now we are discussing 100 percent renewable.

That is a great article, and I recommend reading it.

But it also gave me a new idea.

One of the problems with building large scale renewable energy projects in the desert is that you need long power lines connecting the desert sites to the World’s cities. Those need time and cost money.

So I have been looking for alternatives before, and I have come up with some, like transporting quicklime or making silicon.

Another one would be to use the energy right in the desert to suck up CO2 from the atmosphere. It can be done already with present technology, and interest in doing that will increase a lot over the coming decades, once the damages from global warming become even higher than the $1.2 TRILLION a year right now.

I’m bringing this up because to get 100% renewable energy with intermittent sources, you need much more than 100% of peak capacity installed. Which leads to lots of time slots where you get much more than 100% of demand. One way to use the excess energy is extracting CO2 from the atmosphere. And the nice thing about that is that it doesn’t matter where you do the extracting. Any desert site will do.

Obviously, there needs to be a steady income stream from CO2 cleanup, and it needs to cover the costs. That is a problem that would have to be solved one way or another.

But the point of this post is just to note this idea for further reference later on. It is one more way of using energy right in the desert without a grid in place.

Yet another fact I learned from the excellent report “Europe facing peak oil” by - Benoît Thévard, commissioned by the Greens in the European Parliament, at page 37.

Oil is accounting for 38% of primary energy consumed in the EU, and only 13% of that has been produced there, leaving 87% to be purchased abroad, for EUR 500 billion. By 2020, the dependence on imports will rise to 92%.

That would seem to present some interesting opportunities for saving money, by increasing efficiency and deploying renewable energy on a massive scale. In the 37 years left until 2050, those EUR 500 billion add up to EUR 18.5 trillion, and that’s not even factoring in that oil will only get much more expensive in the coming decades.

Considering this kind of money, the estimate of a measly EUR 666 billion for the Desertec project looks rather lacking in ambition.

Cleantechnica reports that the United States solar market grew by 76% last year, for a total of 3.1 GW installed. The reason for this is mainly that prices are way down. Module prices have gone down 41% in one year to $0.60 per watt.

However, there is still a lot of catching up to do. That 3.1 GW is equivalent to about 10 watt per person, the American population conveniently being around 0.31 billion.

Germany’s record last year was around 7.6 GW last year, and with population at around 0.082 billion, that works out to 92.7 watt per person, or close to ten times the United States record.

Kees van der Leun recently tweeted some fun calculations about what would happen if Germany’s record was reached everywhere. His result is 2,800 GW of capacity. Just for fun, let’s check that. World population is estimated at 7.072 billion. Divide by 0.082 for a factor of around 86. Dividing 2,800 by 86 gets around 32.6 GW, which is about right.

And the World would need to deploy 653 GW a year if everybody reached Germany’s level. That would be more like it for countering climate change than the present real records (30 GW in 2012, and cumulative 100 GW passed only recently).