Concentrated solar power in the United States, Germany, Spain and North Africa.

 The United States, Germany and Spain have led long-standing research programmes in solar thermal electricity, which included experimentation with a variety of designs. The first modern concentrating solar power (CSP) plant with 1 megawatt (MW) capacity had been built in Italy in 1968. The parabolic trough design of a 354 MW plant built in California in 1984 became dominant. Different types of working fluids (such as molten salt), which are a key determinant of the efficiency, have been used. Overall deployment remains much lower than that of wind power, owing to higher cost and water-use conflicts in desert areas. In the United States, costs of producing Concentrated Solar Power are about 12-18 cents per kWh compared with 2 cents for nuclear power, although costs as low as 5 cents might be achievable in the future with heliostat mirrors and gas turbine technology. An industrial consortium, consisting mainly of German companies, has recently been formed with the goal of constructing a country-size CSP facility in North Africa and linking it to the EU power grid with high-voltage alternating current (HVAC) lines. The initiative is commonly known as DESERTEC. The consortium has plans for a €400 billion CSP facility together with solar PV and wind power over an area of 17,000 square kilometres (km2 ) in the Sahara which might deliver as much as 15 per cent of Europe’s power by 2050. Besides the costs, the main obstacle to the realization of the DESERTEC goal continues to be geopolitical in nature.