A Joint initiative undertaken by 12 companies, most of them German, to build solar-power systems in the Middle East and North Africa, and to transmit the resulting electricity to Europe via undersea cables. By 2050 the project is supposed to supply 15% of the Continent’s electricity as well as most of that in the Middle Easter and North African countries where the solar sites will be based, such as Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. The aim of Desertec is to create an industrial and economic infrastructure to exploit – in a commercially profitable yet ecologically clean way – the potential energy of desert sunshine. The project’s economic viability has been boosted by improvements in high-voltage direct current technology, which makes it possible to transmit electricity across great distances with an energy loss of only 3$ per 1,000 km, substantially less than the loss incurred in alternating current transmission. The idea emerged with the publication of the book “The Limits of Growth” by a group of intellectuals which predicted that the finitude of natural resources, especially oil, would effectively curb the world’s ability to sustain economic growth over time, a scenario realized in the oil crisis of 1973. The scope of the investment in Desertec is expected to reach about $600 billion