New cities & SEZ will emerge on desert coasts thanks to cheap solar energy and desalination
By George ELIOT
Technology is starting to revolutionise the desert. The combination of abundant and cheap solar power plus energy-efficient seawater desalination will transform the world's desert coasts over the next 10-20 years. This transformation will be of a scale that rivals the development revolution that the air conditioner brought to the world's subtropical, tropical and equatorial regions (such as Texas, Florida and Singapore, respectively).
Any stretch of ocean coast is by definition prime real estate as long as people can live there. So far the vast majority of the world's desert coasts have remained... deserted. But not for long: as soon as fresh water becomes available (which is a function of the cost of electricity that can be used for seawater desalination going down by 90% over a decade), new cities and special economic zones (SEZ) will emerge. Where small scale diesel power plants were used before, "solar-desal" plants are emerging to take their place on a larger scale.
In terms of attractiveness for human habitation, a desert coast with its dry weather is even better-suited for human settlement than humid tropical areas with monsoon / rainy seasons. And once fresh water is abundant, it will be possible to develop not just the coastal cities proper but also an agricultural belt of irrigated farmland around strings of new cities along the desert coast.
Encouragingly, technology is already being deployed at scale and as a bundle of functions. Chinese company Huawei has created a stand-alone microgrid solar power plant, called FusionSolar, which can power installations unconnected to the national electricity grid. It is composed of solar panels, inverters and storage batteries which provide stable voltage and frequency thanks to a smart power management system. Huawei's FusionSolar demo site shows live data from five installed plants in Spain and Switzerland (of several MW each). It also has installations at remote off-grid mines in Argentina and Mongolia.
Luckily from a geographical and demographic perspective, all five continents that have growing population also have desert coasts, so many countries will be able to benefit from the "solar-desal" revolution:
- The Americas: Mexico (Baja California, Sonora), Peru and Chile.
- Asia: The entire Arab Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, Pakistan and even northwest India.
- Africa: Egypt (both its Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts), Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, Namibia and even northwest South Africa.
- Australia: the northwest coast of the state of Western Australia and the entire south coast.
Many of these areas are not even connected by road currently. However, the new cities that will pop up will help complete the trans-continental infrastructure gaps in desert regions. They will also absorb a lot of the surplus labour from their respective inland "hinterland" and will become economic hubs and engines of development in their own right.
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