Plans to supply all of Europe's electricity from renewable sources has come a step closer thanks to progress in efforts to build a continent-wide supergrid connected to North Africa and theMiddle East.

The notion of a European supergrid was first mooted in 2008 by Gregor Czisch, then a researcher at the University of Kasselin Germany. Czisch, now an energy consultant at the Kassel-based Transnational Renewables Consulting, has produced a model of a vast renewable energy supergrid that stretches from Iceland to North Africa.

The sheer size of this grid would make it possible for Europe to rely entirely on electricity generated from renewables, such as wind, solar and hydro power, Czisch claims. Any intermittency in the supply would be smoothed out by the fact that electricity would always be generated somewhere connected to the supergrid: if the wind dropped across the North Sea, for example, it would still blow across the Sahara.

This grand plan came closer to reality in November 2011, when the Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII), a German-led organisation backed by companies including E.ON, Siemens and Deutsche Bank, announced that it will build a 500-megawatt concentrating solar power plant in the Sahara desert in Morocco. The plant will consist of mirrors spread over some 12 square kilometres to concentrate solar energy onto a fluid to heat it; the hot liquid will then be used to raise steam and generate electricity.

Construction of the first phase of the plant is scheduled to start in 2012 and be completed by 2016, at a cost of around €2 billion.

The DII is the industrial arm of the Desertec Foundation, which was founded in 2009 to generate 15 per cent of Europe’s electricity needs by 2050 from a €400 billion network of solar plants and wind farms dotted across the Sahara and the Arabian peninsula. The power would be transmitted to Europe via dedicated high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) cables, which are more efficient than traditional alternating-current cables over long distances.

Such plants would ultimately form part of a larger Europe-wide supergrid as envisioned by Czisch. In Czisch’s model, two-thirds of the electrical would be provided by wind power, with significant contributions from hydroelectricity plants in Norway and concentrated solar power and biomass plants. The network could supply all of Europe’s electricity needs at a cost of around €46.5 per megawatt-hour - close to today’s prices.

However, not everyone is in favour of such schemes. Building a supergrid would be costly and take many years to complete, says Rory O’Neill, founder of

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