Cat:

Not in my lifetime.

Ah, but I was thinking long term. And, as Jérôme Keynes would tell you: "In the long term, we're all dead"...

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

that I'm not writing that nothing good could ever come of any policy coming out of America, just because it is coming out of America. I've been critical of policies, and politicians but I don't think I've ever written on dKos "whetever you do, it's bad" like you basically did about Europe in this thread.

So,non the comparison is not valid.

In any case, I'm not denying Europe's colonialist past, nor the continued exploitative beahavior of many of its companies in Africa today, but your blanket rejection that anything done with Africa is going to be exploitative by definition is just not acceptable.

Wind power

but there is no room for manoeuver in Cat's position.

It's a different thing to say "there is a significant risk, given the past and some still current European behavior in Africa, that a partnership would end up being unfair" and to say "any partnership will be exploitative because that's what Europeans are and do"

Wind power

I fear that it has more to do with self regard and aspiration than with analytic rigor. What Cat was saying comes from perspective highly critical of US and European civilization and its impact on the rest of the world. She cited Edward Said and, to the extent that I understand Said, seems to be mostly consistent with that approach.

While many of us in the US and Europe are critical of the nature of our societies and do not wish them to continue to have the impacts that they have had on much of the rest of the world we have been signally ineffective in bringing about such change -- to the extent that total system collapse is more likely than orderly internal change.

This is not to say that Jerome, Melanchthon and others are not sincere in their desires to bring about such change, but that has not made it so. I took Cat's comments as being directed at the fact and the likely probability of outcome concerning the relationship between the USA, Europe and Africa. On that I personally suspect she is right. "Not in my lifetime" -- unless via collapse. The poison in the soul of our shared cultures is deep and at the root of its organization. We all have to take responsibility for that, whether we are benificiaries, victims or both.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

I'm not quite clear on what you think is wrong with a 75/25 split in electricity usage between the present EU and North Africa. North Africa has pretty precisely 25 % of the population of the combined EU+NA system. So, ceteris paribus, we should expect it to have 25 % of the electricity usage. Maybe differences in demographics would tilt the population ratio to 70/30 in 2050, but that's still close enough for corporate work.

The fact that North Africa will have a greater share of electricity production relative to population in an EU+NA system than the EU is not so different from the fact that Italy, France and Spain have a larger share of EU wine production relative to population than Finland, Sweden and Norway. I'm sure that Finland could make fine wine, if they threw sufficient resources at the problem. But that would hardly be the smartest or the most elegant way to provide Europe with wine...

- Jake

Austerity can only be implemented in the shadow of a concentration camp.

"project finance"?

Project finance is exactly what Jake described, and you actually could not get project finance in Algeria for a big investment project like he describes but based on local demand, because project financiers want to see high probability cash flows to be in a position to lend, and for some reason (European oppression, probably, they don't trust the locals to pay them back, and require export contracts backed by creditable parties to provide these.

Wind power

another scenario would be that Siemens et al build multi-billion-dollar facilities but keep complete control of it, without tech transfer or ownership, and thus it's them selling both to Spain and Algeria even if they also pay rent for the desert land;

Yes, that is another possible scenario. Our job as lefties is to make sure that's not the way it turns out.

I do think that Spain has enough solar resource (and a good one at that) to supply itself;

OK, point. I originally used Libya and Italy, but the fact that Libya has oil means that they have access to hard currency to fund the project without building new export infrastructure (ditto for Egypt and the Suez canal), which complicates the argument a little without adding anything substantial to the conclusion.

I am not convinced that the Desertec plans are much more than greenwashing for the companies involved, that is: if realised, it may not grow beyond the scale of a few GW;

I wasn't talking about Desertec specifically - rather, I was thinking a Gazprom-style sovereign utility on the African side and a Ruhrgas-style quasi-sovereign utility on the European side. That seems to have worked out well enough for Russia, and anything that could survive the Yeltsin years is surely a solid design. And solar power - particularly solar power for export via HVDC lines - is an infrastructure business in the same way that natural gas is: You can only sell the power in the places that you have power lines to, and the infrastructure represents a substantial up-front cost.

Unlike gas, however, it does not run out, so if you take good care of your infrastructure, you can keep using it essentially forever. Which in turn means that as soon as it is fully amortised, it makes free electricity in perpetuity (or until Sahara gets a cloud cover or the Earth's axial tilt changes - but in both those cases you'd have to reevaluate your business model for other reasons...).

Sub-Saharan Africa? They have superior resources

Actually, no: they may have a higher angle of the Sun in the sky, but clouds, too.

I was thinking about the Sahara here as well: From a pure production perspective, the smart way to power sub-Saharan Africa would be to start from the south end of Sahara and work your way North. And you'll run out of solar panels long before you reach the border.

- Jake

Austerity can only be implemented in the shadow of a concentration camp.

Nitpicking your nitpick:

According to your map, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan, which are not usually seen as North African countries, are located in the maximum solar potential zone...

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char