The World in 2030

220 The World in 2030
pondered the idea of using the world’s deserts as giant solar
capture regions:
For years, rogue environmentalists have been pointing
out that solar electricity generated in the Sahara
could supply all of Europe, the Gobi could power
China and the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, Atacama and
the Great Victoria deserts could electrify their entire
continents. These people have been dismissed as nutters.
The development of cheap DC cables 420 suggests
that they might one day be proved right. 421
And two reports from the German Aerospace Centre –
‘Concentrating Solar Power for the Mediterranean’ 422 and
‘Trans-Mediterranean Interconnection for Concentrating
Solar Power’ 423 – investigate in practical terms how vast new
solar farms in the deserts of North Africa could potentially
solve Europe’s looming energy crisis and help slash the
continent’s carbon emissions.
But perhaps the most exciting application of solar energy
lies right above our heads; an average of 3kW of power is
potentially available from every rooftop 424 and this form of
distributed power generation would break the centralised
monopoly of power generation. Many people believe that
the generation of power from fossil fuels, energy that is then
distributed from a central supply, is a key factor in creating
the rich-poor divide in the world. A distributed model of
solar power generation would begin to solve this problem.
Finally in this section on solar energy devices, it is worth
noting that new low-cost ‘spray on’ or ‘print on’ plastic solar