During the summer of 1913, in a field just south of Cairo on the eastern bank of the Nile, an American engineer called Frank Shuman stood before a gathering of Egypt's colonial elite, including the British consul-general Lord Kitchener, and switched on his new
"The human race must finally utilise direct sun power or revert to barbarism," wrote Shuman in a letter to Scientific
Almost a century later, a convoy of air-conditioned coaches sweeps through the affluent suburb of Maadi – where Shuman had demonstrated his fledgling solar panels – continuing south for 90km towards Kuraymat, an area of flat, uninhabited desert near the city of Beni Suef. The high-level international delegation of CEOs, politicians, financiers and scientists has come to visit a brand new "hybrid" power station that uses both natural gas and solar panels to generate electricity. Before the coaches reach the facility's security gates, its 6,000 parabolic troughs – each six metres tall with a combined surface area of 130,000sq metres – are already visible from the perimeter road. Even though the panels account for just one seventh of the power plant's 150MW generating capacity, the Egyptian government, which has been pushing to develop the site since 1997, hopes to prove to the delegation that it is the desert sun – not fossil fuels, such as gas, coal and oil – that should be used not only to generate far more of the electricity across the Middle East and North Africa (Mena), but, crucially, for neighbouring Europe, too.
Gerhard Knies, a German particle physicist, was the first person to estimate how much solar