“The oil of the 21st century is not buried deep within the earth. Instead, it falls on its surface – as sunshine.”
This is the great opening quote from an article in the German publication Spiegel, which gave the organization Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC) a great boost of publicity with this article.
TREC is an initiative that campaigns for the transmission of clean power from deserts throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. It was founded in 2003 by The Club of Rome, the Hamburg Climate Protection Foundation and the National Energy Research Center of Jordan, and has since developed the DESERTEC Concept and researched it in cooperation with the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
“We don’t have an energy problem,” says Hans Müller-Steinhagen, of the DLR. “We have an energy conversion and distribution problem.”
I love the idea of the Sahara being a major source of solar thermal power for a significant chunk of the world and I was thoroughly convinced about the feasibility of TREC’s proposition. Let’s watch this (vast) space.
