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Realists have every reason to be depressed about global warming and the energy crisis, notwithstanding the recent Stern Report and some signs at last that the British Government is taking some note of these issues. The reason for gloom is the extreme difficulty of reconciling the aims of global economic growth, with the prospects they offer of acceptable living standards for countless millions of dispossessed peoples, with the equal necessity to constrain energy consumption. It so often seems that what is proposed by way of remedy is the merest tokenism - how likely is it that taxing Four by Four vehicles, buying energy-saving light-bulbs, and putting a (small) tax on flights - is going to affect the awesome arithmetic of increasing global outputs of carbon dioxide? It seems that the costs of any change become immediately all-too-visible and unacceptable, and that the consequences for economic competition of making changes in energy use are so feared, that in effect, progress is held back almost to the speed of the slowest.

The most recent ‘technical fix’ to have been announced, the decision to go ahead with an experimental nuclear fission plant at a cost of £7 billion, seems more a resort to scientific magic or gambling than a realistic solution. After years of experiment, fission power has generated no electricity whatever, net of what is consumed in its experiments, and there is great uncertainty about whether it ever will even in fifty years. One scientist was reported as describing the commitment to the fussion reactor as a job-creation scheme for plasma physicists.

In the same family of remedies is the recourse to nuclear power, with all its associated problems of non-disposable nuclear waste, and its continuing links with military megalomania. No one seems to have any difficulties in seeing those military connections in relation to Iran. (Or indeed now Russia with the murky assassination of Litvinenko by radioactive poison.) It is only the British national psyche that seems blind to these links, though it seems that those (such as Tony Blair) who favour nuclear power as a mode of energy production often also favour nuclear weapons as, in Edward Thompson’s terms, a mode of exterminism. [1]

Well, in this gloomy scene appeared a report (Guardian November 27 ‘How mirrors can light up the world’, by Ashley Seagar [2]), describing a form of potentially abundant, safe, and technically feasible energy, that might enable a solution to be found to these problems. The source of energy is Concentrated Solar Power, or CSP, which consists of nothing more recondite than large arrays of mirrors, installed in hot desert regions (of which the world has a superfluity), and designed to focus the sun’s direct heat as ‘fuel’ for relatively conventional power stations. (There are different arrangements of these, beamed on tubes or on a central collecting element.) The main proponents of this technology are two German scientists, Dr Gerhard Knies, and Dr Franz Trieb of the German Air and Space Agency. The data they have produced in support of their proposals are remarkable in its implications.[3]

Of course it is the case that hot desert regions, such as those of North Africa, South Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, Australia and Mongolia, are generally remote from settlement, and any large current land-use. It is known that the energy loss involved in conventional electricity power transmission by power lines is prohibitively high. Knies and Trieb argue however that by substituting direct current for the conventional alternating current power grids, these losses can be largely avoided. They estimate that to ‘transport’ electricity through a high-voltage DC power grid from North Africa to the UK would involve a loss of only 10% of energy (3% per 1000 kilometres). Compare that with the current thermal efficiency of many conventional electricity generating power stations of only 30-40%.

The claim is made that only 0.5% of the land-surface area of hot deserts need be equipped with Concentrated Solar Power generating systems to supply the entire current needs of the planet. While even this 0.5% is a large land-surface, and while these estimates might turn out to be wrong by a significant factor (for example taking account of seasonal effects), it is clear that the potential of this resource to meet energy needs is, if these claims are largely correct, enormous.

The advocates of this technology point out that its efficiency would be greatly increased, and the costs of its energy reduced, if CSP were conceived as a holistic system, producing energy, cool shade (in the shadow of the arrays of mirrors) and desalinated water. In effect this is proposing for CSP something like the combined heat and power which would have vastly increased the energy efficiency of conventional oil, gas and coal electricity generation, if we had originally adopted it. ‘Industrial scale’ CSP systems can become nuclei of productive economic zones, in other words. They could export electricity, receive an income flow which can be invested in other kinds of production, and produce shade and desalinated water which would make possible agriculture and forestry in regions where desert conditions now make this impossible.

Knies and Trieb propose that over 40 years a new electricity grid be constructed, to supply Concentrated Solar Power electricity from North Africa to Europe. One can see why these ideas might have their main European support in Germany, which is itself poor in primary energy sources. It appears that steam generation by these means does not have to stop at sunset, because of the possibility of storing hot liquid, but that in any case CSP can and would need to be supplemented by conventional energy sources, to ensure even supply. But it is a different matter to assume that oil, coal and gas can be used in the long term as a fraction of a larger sustainable energy supply, than that we go on pumping and digging it out of the ground at the present rate until there is none of it left.

CSP technologies are now in use at a number of sites (for example the Mojave desert in California), and are under construction in Nevada, Australia, and southern Spain. At this present relatively small scale, cost-per-unit of electricity remains relatively expensive, compared with conventional sources in which large investments have already taken place. (Though it appears that it is now equivalent in cost to a barrel of oil.) But scaled up to a ‘mass’ scale, the economics become quite different, and CSP becomes fully competitive with all other existing or likely energy sources.

Technologies have major political and social consequences, which are often overlooked when choices between them are considered. [4] Nuclear technologies, for example, are centralist, partially militarised, and secretive in their modes of operation. Their transfer from the existing rich nations, to the rest of the world, is already fraught with conflict, resentment and fear. They need to be phased out, not expanded. We see the mixed outcomes of the petroleum technologies of internal combustion and jet engines for the organisation of space in society, through the development of mass motor car and air transport. The effects of the economy of oil on those nations and regions where it is located have been in many ways harmful. Oil functions as a kind of ‘black gold’, providing a large surplus for its ‘owners’ which often does not create much labour or social benefit close to its extraction. A kind of ‘oil feudalism’ seems to be its characteristic outcome, whether in Saudi Arabia or Texas.

Concentrated Solar Power seems from this point to have the more benign potential of a return to a neo-Fordist system of mass production, both industrial and agricultural, whose distributive and socially-integrative effects would be positive. Large industrial undertakings will be required to manufacture and maintain these power plants, in widely distributed regions of the globe. Agriculture and industry will, if the advocates of this technology are correct, grow up in literally in their shadow. A new transcontinental grid for power transmission would no doubt suffer its periodic black-outs and break-downs, but would have a built-in redundancy of routeways and sources which would render it essentially secure. There is thus the prospect of a win-win situation in which all the partners gain - those whose hot deserts become sources of wealth, of several kinds, and those in colder temperate regions like those of Europe who find a plentiful and non-destructive source of energy.

Finally, there is a potentially benign geo-political consequence of this technology, in the first instance for Europe and the Mediterranean. Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, can become mutually interdependent, on the basis of mutual exchanges of goods and resources, instead of the present situation where islands of oil treasure are fought over by European and American armies, and their corrupted satellite states, while the rest of the region is left to its deprivation, humiliation and misery. Only a federation the size of the European Union is capable of instituting this technology on a sufficient scale. The cooperation that this will require with the essentially Muslim countries of the southern and eastern Mediterranean offers a possible way of resolving the developing war of ‘Christian’ and ‘Muslim’ civilisations which is in reality merely a displacement of conflicts between the possessors and the dispossessed of the world.

The technology of Concentrated Solar Power, if industrially implanted in hot desert regions with low populations, and networked to regions of dense settlement both near and far, has the potential to provide a new economic base for a prosperous industrial and post-industrial society. It is a precondition for the survival and spread of the ‘European social model’, which currently combines commitment to democracy, human rights, and universal prosperity, as no other social system in the world does so well. What a fortunate state of affairs it will be if material necessity, and the providential fall of the hot sun, leads to the opening-up of ‘Fortress Europe’ and the realisation that the true boundaries of this society have been set for it by nature, not religion.