Dii – Helping Spawn a Green Revolution

Dr. Henner Gladen, Co-Founder of Solar Millennium AG, Erlangen

On 26 and 27 October 2010 I experienced a very special premiere in Barcelona, when the 50 partners of the industry initiative Dii met with well-known experts from politics and science for an exchange on the largest renewable energy project of all times. Numerous participants from countries like Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt showed that the Desertec concept is also attracting a great deal of interest in North Africa – just a year after the initiative was founded. Key note speaker Günther Oettinger, EU Commissioner for Energy, opened the first annual Dii conference and promised political support from Brussels for the further internationalization of the energy market. The Solar Millennium Group is represented in Dii via its Flagsol subsidiary. This makes us one of the 13 pioneers that founded Dii GmbH in Munich in the summer of 2009 for the purpose of making the fascinating Desertec idea a reality through the bundling of expertise: Solar and wind power from the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are to be fed into the grids of the region, but also transported to Europe.

By 2050, up to 15 percent of European electricity demand is expected to be covered with regenerative power from this region. In the meantime, Dii is supported by more than 50 institutions; the share of international support has risen constantly. As a next step we want to jointly come up with concrete roll-out plans and financing concepts among other things and start the preparations for the construction of a number of networked climate-friendly power plants distributed across the MENA region. We will, for example, establish the political and economic conditions for cleaner, sustainable power generation from the desert. The frontrunner here is Morocco, where Dii sees high realization opportunities for the timely realization of its concept. Our annual conference provided an appraisal of the most important aspects in order to get this massive project off the ground: At which sites, using which technology and at what cost can renewable energy be generated?

Reference projects like the Andasol power plants that we developed and research projects such as the construction of ever more efficient collectors are paving the way here. Our focus here also lies on the cooperation with local teams and partners from the MENA region for the purpose of realizing a win-win situation and carrying out cooperations that cross borders both geographically and in terms of culture. Solar-thermal power plants in North Africa today are no longer a vision for the Solar Millennium Group. In Kuraymat, 100 kilometers south of Cairo, we recently finished a massive solar field for Egypt’s first hybrid power plant, thereby gaining very good experience in the cooperation with our North African partners.