Can the Canaries win the race for power survival?
Imagine a solar energy platform, the size of Gran Canaria, moored at sea, supplying enough clean, sustainable energy to power the whole of Europe. Wolfgang Ehrlich, and his team at the MARE Initiative can, but do politicians and businessmen have the scope to match that imagination, to solve the World energy crisis, as traditional fuel sources slip away like the sands of time.
It’s not a new problem to German born Wolfgang, scientific advisor and project holder for MARE, Mid Atlantic Renewable Energy, but after over 30 years of people laughing at his predictions of impending doom, the current upward spiral of oil prices has focused self centred minds on other ways to fuel the planet. Gradually becoming a Tenerife resident from 1995, Wolfgang has turned his thoughts to the particular problems of the Canary Islands and the unique chance they have to respond using the advantages of their Atlantic setting.
With a father involved in the building of nuclear power plants, breakfast discussions were heated and knowledgeable in the Ehrlich household but Wolfgang’s concerns were pushed to the background after becoming a Bachelor of Science in Physics and moving into various business concerns including I.T. Matters came to a head when Wolfgang was trying to build a massive film stage project in Adeje in 2004. “We needed large amounts of energy to power the project, and the best anyone could suggest was to use 10 diesel generators, this went against all of my instincts and seemed the least eco friendly thing imaginable, so I became involved with MARE.”
The Gran Canaria sized platform is an extreme and utopian solution, but for a start, maybe a platform to power just one island or a series of islands like the Canaries or Cape Verde would be easily obtainable. “The system would use Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) which can be fed ashore down extremely efficient high voltage cables that hardly lose any power in transit, over any distance, at a cost of just 5 to 7 cents per kilowatt. A test platform could be running in 3 years and would be modular, so extra capacity could be added in stages.” If all this sounds a logistical nightmare, Wolfgang points out that “in terms of a channel tunnel or a space station, the technology is a lot easier to assemble, and there are already major solar power projects up and running such as Kramer Junction (see pic) in California.”
La Transicion is a forum that has been set up to co-ordinate ideas like MARE and other forms of alternative power, in an effort to pool resources and ideas together, and is another area that Wolfgang is involved in. Another project that could be adapted to the Canary Islands is the growth of sea floor algae for bio fuel. Warnings have been sounded over using traditional food crops to make bio fuel but Wolfgang stresses that this algae grows freely at a greatly accelerated rate compared to field crops and would work well.
Figures from leading scientists in fuel studies are alarming, they suggest that oil reserves are much lower than we care to believe, producing countries are depleting their stocks on home consumption, let alone supplying the World market, and oil production has peaked and is fast running out. This is not very palatable news for politicians to serve up to the electorate, so many are still in denial and it may be the cold financial realities of oil costs that finally force action to seek alternatives.
In the meantime MARE and La Transicion will keep pushing in the hope that choices can be made quickly to avert the unthinkable and save us from sliding into a new dark age.
