Sustainable Energy Transformations, Power and Politics Morocco and the Mediterranean Routledge Studies in Energy Transitions Series

This book analyses energy transitions and the opportunities and challenges for building sustainable energy systems to improve human capabilities while protecting the environment.

Sufficient and secure energy supply is critical to human thriving and socioeconomic development. Yet energy systems are also implicated in the most pressing socio-environmental challenges of our time - climate change, air pollution, and water and land use. This book examines what is arguably the most ambitious vision for a renewable energy based system worldwide. This vision, often called Desertec, is for a regional electricity system supplying North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East with sustainable and affordable power. The behemoth plan would entail building dozens of large-scale solar and wind power plants mostly in North Africa, interconnecting the fragmented transmission infrastructure of 38 Mediterranean countries, and linking North Africa to the European Union (EU) through undersea transmission cables. Within the Mediterranean, the book focuses on Morocco, which is one of the most advanced developing countries in renewable energy scale-up, to understand its motivations for building renewable energy and the effects on sustainable development. The book therefore takes a unique multi-scalar approach to understanding the social and political aspects of energy transitions, weaving together the views of villagers living near Morocco?s first solar energy zone with the perspectives of national decision-makers in Morocco with the views of European policymakers and major transnational energy companies in the Mediterranean region.

This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and policymakers interested in energy transitions, sustainable and renewable energy, Mediterranean politics, sustainable development and environment and sustainability more generally.

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Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

PART I

Large-scale energy system transformations

1. Introduction: Visions for sustainable energy transformations
2. The history of concentrating solar power and large-scale engineering projects for the Mediterranean
3. The critical geopolitics of renewable energy and spatial energy justice: Envisioning the Mediterranean, perceiving Desertec
4. The life cycle of a vision: Desertec system designs

PART II

Nation-state visions for just and socially sustainable energy development

5. The social pillar of sustainable development in Morocco’s solar imaginary
6. Neocolonial or not? Evaluating North-South-South partnership on electricity integration
7. Socially sustainable solar power development: From national dreams to local outcomes
8. Conclusion: Energy justice and security in visions of multi-scalar systems

Index

Sharlissa Moore is an Assistant Professor of International Energy Policy, jointly appointed between the International Relations fields in James Madison College and the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at Michigan State University, USA.