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Desert Power: The Economics of Solar Thermal Electricity for Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East

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  • Kevin Ummel
  • David Wheeler

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    Abstract

    A climate crisis is inevitable unless developing countries limit carbon emissions from the power sector in the near future. This will happen only if the costs of lowcarbon power production become competitive with fossil fuel power. We focus on a leading candidate for investment: solar thermal or concentrating solar power (CSP), a commercially available technology that uses direct sunlight and mirrors to boil water and drive conventional steam turbines. Solar thermal power production in North Africa and the Middle East could provide enough power to Europe to meet the needs of 35 million people by 2020. We compute the subsidies needed to bring CSP to financial parity with fossil-fuel alternatives. We conclude that large-scale deployment of CSP is attainable with subsidy levels that are modest, given the planetary stakes. By the end of the program, unsubsidized CSP projects are likely to be competitive with coal- and gasbased power production in Europe. The question is not whether CSP is feasible but whether programs using CSP technology will be operational in time to prevent catastrophic climate change. For such programs to spur the clean energy revolution, efforts to arrange financing should begin right away, with site acquisition and construction to follow within a year.

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    File URL: http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1417884
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    Bibliographic Info

    Paper provided by Center for Global Development in its series Working Papers with number 156.

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    Length: 46 pages
    Date of creation: Dec 2008
    Date of revision:
    Handle: RePEc:cgd:wpaper:156

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    Web page: http://www.cgdev.org

    Related research

    Keywords: Solar energy; Africa; climate change; energy technology;

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

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    Cited by:
    1. Peters, Michael & Schmidt, Tobias S. & Wiederkehr, David & Schneider, Malte, 2011. "Shedding light on solar technologies'A techno-economic assessment and its policy implications," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(10), pages 6422-6439, October.
    2. David Wheeler & Saurabh Shome, 2010. "Less Smoke, More Mirrors: Where India Really Stands on Solar Power and Other Renewables," Working Papers id:2492, eSocialSciences.
    3. Kevin Ummel, 2010. "Concentrating Solar Power in China and India: A Spatial Analysis of Technical Potential and the Cost of Deployment," Working Papers id:2807, eSocialSciences.

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