By Jeremy van Loon and Oliver Suess
Siemens AG, Germany’s biggest engineering company, and Munich Re are holding talks with utilities on developing solar plants in the Sahara desert to supply 15 percent of Europe’s power needs by mid-century.
The discussions, which include German power companies RWE AG and E.ON AG, as well as Deutsche Bank AG, are in the early stages, Siemens spokesman Marc Langendorf said today. Turbines built by the Munich-based manufacturer may be used, he said.
The German companies want to harness a free fuel source that’s plentiful in one of the world’s poorest regions and sell the power to industrialized Europe. The plants may cost 400 billion euros ($555 billion) through 2050 and stretch across 130 square kilometers (50 square miles) of the North African desert, Munich Re said in a document published on its Web site today.
“The technology exists to realize a project of this scale,” said Sven Teske, renewable-energy program director at Greenpeace in Amsterdam. “The main constraint would be putting together a legal and political framework to have agreements on cross-border trade to allow the electricity into Europe.”
The project would need high-voltage cables to move the power from the sparsely populated Sahara under the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, which already is struggling to accommodate increasing power supply from the sun and wind with existing electricity-transmission grids.
