Renewable Energy at Enormous Scale

We all wonder where and when the world will see one single implementation of renewable energy at a scale capable of making a huge impact on our use of fossil fuels. It’s a good bet that this will come in the form of a concentrated solar power (aka solar thermal) plant in Northern Africa that will provide electricity for not only that region, but for Europe as well.

Though we are a long way from that day, the project described here in Morocco is a first glimpse at what this overall effort might look like; this is a 160-megawatt CSP plant utilizing molten salt energy storage, the subsequent phases of which will enable Morocco to provide power to a million homes and replace half of its fossil fuel consumption by the year 2020.