It is no news for you if you subscribed to this website : solar thermal alone could provide up to a quarter of global electricity by 2050. The use of molten salt could enable our civilization to store solar electricity for up to seven hours.
Morocco is ideally located to harvest all this energy as the average sunshine there is over 3,000 hours per year ( over 8 hours a day ). The Kingdom will build for $9 billion (6.6 billion euros) up to 2 GW of capacity.
This will be brought by five different plants of both solar photovoltaic and thermal and will answer up to 42 percent of the national need by 2020.
To Cleantechnica :
The five plants are to be built sequentially, with the first one starting up in 2015, saving money right away, by beginning to cut Moroccan dependence on foreign oil and gas imports from nearby neighbors.
(…) Morocco’s Finance Minister Salaheddine Mezouar says that the project will send a very clear message about the need to face up to the challenges of climate change, and that this is just the beginning for the nation.
He said, “Morocco is determined to protect the environment in all its future projects.”Energy Minister Amina Benkhadra also appears undaunted. She promises: “This is a bold but realistic project. We will guarantee all the technical and financial resources to make it succeed.”
The Moroccan government is mobilizing multiple financing sources, and partnering with the World Bank, the European Commission and Desertec to bring about this promise for a future of clean solar power.
On the other hand, the Kingdom is also willing to build a nuclear power plant. This comprehensive clean energy policy can be explained by the fact that the country is not producing any oil and depends heavily on coal.