Gerhard Knies
Chair of the Supervisory Board, Desertec Foundation; Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC), Hamburg, Germany
Breaking the Wall of the Fossil Age. How Desertec Can Overcome Energy Resource Limitations and Global Warming.
We all know that one of the key challenges of our time is to find new sources of energy – but most of us wouldn’t look for it in the Saharan desert. Why not? More energy falls on the world’s deserts in six hours than the world consumes in a year. The Sahara, the world’s largest desert, is virtually uninhabited. Building solar thermal power plants in this vast space could generate electricity, which would then be transmitted to countries in Europe and Africa through high-voltage direct current transmission. Due to the high solar radiation in the Sahara, such plants could deliver fifteen percent of electricity needs in Europe alone – one sixth of its electricity.
To make this revolutionary idea for carbon-free power generation reality, the physicist Gerhard Knies (1937) initiated the Desertec Industrial Initiative, which aims at finding sustainable power supply for all regions of the world with access to deserts. Desertec is supported by a consortium of companies from various European countries, which strive together to make use of one of the biggest naturalsources of energy: desert sun.
