Brett Neely

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My most recent story for Marketplace is about a German foundation‘s plan to build giant solar-thermal power plants in the North African desert. The plan’s backers say it could provide 15 percent of Europe’s electricity.

It’s an interesting proposal and I wish I had had more than two minutes to cover it. There are plenty of things to like about this project. First, the technology is already in use in the Mojave Desert, so at least one pie in sky aspect of this proposal is feasible. Also, it’s got the backing of big companies, including Siemens and Munich Re, which means they have resources to sink into something of this scale.

Yet there’s a way in which I wonder if this is too big of an idea. Presented as it is, Desertec needs dozens of governments, the European Union and thousands of companies to cooperate. It will take decades to produce results. That’s fine but the organizers are clearly trying to build excitement around the concept and sadly, when people get excited, they tend to expect short-term results.

There’s also some some strangely nationalistic PR that’s going into selling this to a German audience. I went to a press conference in Berlin on this a week and a half ago, where Desertec presented a study it did with Greenpeace saying the solar industry could produce hundreds of thousands of German jobs. Max Schön, the Desertec board member I spoke to, said this was vital for German industry because they had missed out on other high-technology industries such as mobile phones. Though it’s not incompatible with his vision that this will also create jobs in North Africa, it was a bit dissonant to me.