When I gave a presentation on the challenges of electricity generation to 10 classes of local middle school students a while back, one of the things I stressed to them was how we were entering an age of localized energy. I didn’t mean generating electricity local to the end users (that’s decentralization, and we’ll see plenty of that, as well), but local to the energy source. You erect wind turbines where there’s a lot of wind (including coastal areas, like my beloved Great Lakes), solar plants where it’s sunny, geothermal where you have hot rocks, and wave and tidal generators where you have, well, waves and tides. Instead of exploiting very energy dense fossil fuels, we’ll shift to a model of collecting and concentrating renewable energy.[1]

The first problem with that Utopian view is that the “Big Two” of renewables–wind and solar–have that blasted intermittancy problem. This can be overcome, but at added cost. Instead of solar PV, you can use solar thermal with heat storage for non-sunny times (read: night), and wind power can use a similar system or pumped storage or be linked into a much larger supergrid to exploit the fact that “the wind might not blow all the time in any one place, but it’s always blowing somewhere”, as so many others have observed.

The second problem is getting the electrons from those windy plains, sunny deserts, coastal areas, etc. to the consumers who would like to, you know, consume those electrons.

As with any economic decision, the number one thing investors fear is uncertainty. But the growing realization that the climate chaos mess is far more serious than many thought, even just a couple of years ago, seems to be convincing some of the right people that there will be a steady market for pricier electrons for decades to come. In other words, investing a huge amount of money upfront in, say, a series of massive solar generators in North Africa to feed electrons to Europe, looks far less risky now than it did fairly recently. This shift in perception (which is based in reality, albeit via a tardy recognition of such), is a good example of how schemes like this can transmute from bad science fiction into good business in a hurry.

Why pick Africa solar power as an example? TreeHugger tells us about Huge Solar Power in the Sahara Project Moving Forward:

Utilizing the vast solar power potential of the Sahara has been a twinkle in the eye of many a European politician for a while now. Even though the logistics of building huge solar power arrays in the desert and then transmitting that electricity back across the Mediterranean isn’t exactly simple, to say the least. Well, a consortium of German companies wants to turn that dream into reality and is raising money to make it happen:

AFP reports that about 20 companies will band together and attempt to raise €400 billion ($554 billion) to finance the Desertec project.

The plan is place solar power arrays in various countries in the region, concentrating on those which are most politically stable. Taken together all the individual solar power plants of Desetec could generate about 15% of Europe’s electricity. But probably not for some time; the first electricity won’t be transmitted until perhaps 2019.

…

Perhaps the biggest challenge is actually getting the electricity back to Europe, though not from a technical perspective. Speaking last March in Copenhagen, Anthony Patt of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis pointed out that Europe’s electricity distribution system is really a collection of 27 different systems. Until these are more fully integrated, distributing the Sahara’s electricity could be difficult.

This obviously won’t happen as soon as we’d like, and it’s clear from the last graf above that Europe, often viewed as a monolithic block from over here in the US, has at least as many issues with a fragmented market as we do.

But this too shall be solved once enough people realize where reality insists we must go, namely to vastly cleaner methods of doing practically everything, and the markets that creates or supports. Never forget Lou’s First Law of Computers (and Life in General): A sufficiently large economic incentive beats a royal flush.[2]

[1] Very few of them had the raised-eyebrow epiphany I was hoping for at this point. Perhaps I should have draw some sort of analogy to American Idol or Jon and Kate plus 8.

[2] To which I feel obligated to add: Lou’s Second Law of Computers: The typos will get you every tiem.