Concentrated Solar Power

If you were to ask a random person in the street about solar power they would probably describe it as a useful tool in the fight against climate change, but as nothing more than that; certainly not in damp, cloudy northern Europe at any rate.

All that however could soon be about to change if a plan by a team of European scientists gets the go-ahead. They believe that a technology known as ‘concentrated solar power’ has the capacity to deliver carbon free electricity to the whole of Europe in little over a generation.

The technology is actually very straightforward. A concentrated solar power plant uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight and create heat. The resultant heat is then used to drive turbines and generators, just like a conventional power station.

Sounds too good to be true? Well there is a catch. The difficulty is that you need direct sunshine, and a lot of it, to make it work. In fact to find somewhere with enough sunshine, you have to go to the deserts of North Africa. Once you get there though the potential is staggering. It is estimated that a single square kilometre of desert can provide the same amount of energy as 1.5 million barrels of oil. In fact if you were to cover less than 1% of the world’s deserts with CSP plants you could meet the world’s entire energy needs.

Building CSP plants to harness this power is the easy bit. The challenge is getting that energy from the desert to homes in the UK. Conventional high voltage AC power lines aren’t really up to the task - you lose too much energy in the process to make it worthwhile. The answer put forward by the scientific team backing CSP is to build a high voltage direct current grid across Europe and North Africa; this will enable the transmission of electricity from North Africa to London with only a minimal loss of power.

Earlier this year I led a Parliamentary debate on CSP and I called on the Government to support the construction of just such a grid. Yes it would be costly, but its capacity to provide homes in the UK with a reliable and almost limitless supply of solar energy, and in doing so slash our carbon emissions, is something that the UK cannot surely afford to ignore.