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Charli Shield: I'm in Morocco. In a small city called Ouarzazate, about 200km southeast of Marrakech. Sometimes called the 'door to the desert', this place is en route to the Sahara. It's hemmed in by the Atlas Mountains, sitting on a bare plateau about 1100 meters above sea level. Here is a wide expanse of rocky ochre earth. Smooth, clay coloured buildings rise up out of the dust. And along the streets, the occasional palm tree casts a long, skinny shadow.
Ouarzazate is probably best known for the Atlas Film Studios, where many a blockbuster has been filmed. The Mummy, Gladiator, Game of Thrones season three. It's a long, impressive list.
That isn't what brought me here, though.
Here in the Moroccan desert, about ten kilometers from the city of Ouarzazate, stands one of the world's largest solar power plants. Noor, it's called, which means light in Arabic.
25 year old Imrane is my guide this morning. He's actually an optometrist by day, but he drives ride shares on the side to meet people and have something to do, he tells me. As we head out along the perimeter of the Noor power plant, we see signs to watch out for camels.
Stretching over nearly 500 hectares, which is about 600 rugby fields. Noor produces enough energy to power more than a million homes in Morocco. But this is not your typical solar farm.
Instead of the black PV panels we're used to seeing, Noor uses concentrated solar power, CSP for short. A field of 2 million giant mirrors reflect the sun's rays onto a central receiver that sits at the top of a 247 meter tall tower. The concentrated sunlight melts molten salt to 600°C. That makes steam, which spins turbines, generating electricity even hours after sunset.
The power plant is hard to miss from most vantage points in Ouarzazate. From a distance, its enormous silver tower glows a blindingly bright white, rising tall out of the desert plain, surrounded by millions of shimmering mirrors. It looks like something straight out of Star Trek.
But looking around the rest of the city, there's scant modern technology to speak of. There's not much public transport. Locals struggle to find work. Electricity is expensive and most households use butane gas. And it got me thinking. If there's so much sun in this part of the world and humans have now figured out how to turn sunlight into power more cheaply than burning fuel, what's stopping the clean energy revolution from arriving here? Hey, I'm Charli Shield, co-host of Living Planet.
Recurring series opener
Intissar Fakir: All right, so recording on my end and ready whenever you are.
Intissar Fakir is a senior fellow and founding director of the North Africa and the Sahel program at the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C. She's from Morocco, not too far from Ouarzazate.
Intissar: I was born and grew up in Marrakech. And I'm not biased, but it's my favorite!
Charli: Intissar recently edited a big report about North Africa's power shift. The ambition, the hurdles and the politics. So I called her up to ask her about how Morocco is tracking.
Intissar: It's one of the most ambitious, certainly in North Africa. I think they've made more progress than really any other North African countries.
Charli: Even by global standards, Morocco's transition plan is pretty ambitious. By 2030, the country plans to be able to power its economy with 52% renewable electricity. By 2050, it's aiming for 70% clean power capacity. And if you just look at Morocco's geography: ample sun, plentiful coastal wind, that seems eminently possible.
But the overhaul required is pretty enormous.
Intissar: They are still reliant, heavily reliant on fossil fuels, particularly coal generation. You know, they've they've tried to decrease their use of coal over the past couple of years, but it's still not enough. I mean, they alone, just the fossil fuel generated electricity contributes about 48% of the country's energy related greenhouse gas emissions.
Charli: In addition to coal. Morocco also still uses a lot of oil and gas. And since almost none of these fossil fuels are found on Moroccan soil. The country is currently forced to import about 90% of its energy needs. Most of it comes from the US and from Spain, and that dependency is enormously expensive.
Intissar: The national budget is dominated by the costs of energy imports because they are subject to energy market fluctuations and, of course, prices. You know, gas and oil prices are high. And so the costs of importing fossil fuels continues to be a significant chunk of the national budget. That's money that could be used in other areas. It could be used for investment.
It could be used for any number of different priorities.
Charli: Other priorities like public health care, infrastructure, education, and job creation. Things that are so lacking in Morocco that thousands of its citizens recently took to the streets in protest.
The youth led protests, which began peacefully, were met with a violent crackdown from Moroccan security forces. Alongside anger over a lack of investment in basic services, people are also angry about the rising costs of living, which are, in part, determined by those fluctuating oil and gas prices Intissar mentioned earlier. Prices that go up when natural disasters strike, economic conditions change, and conflicts break out.
Intissar: The consumer really has to pay quite a lot for petrol and gas and so on. And Morocco is one of those places that is sort of highly motorized. So everybody has, you know, regardless of the socioeconomics, everybody has either a car or a motorbike or something. So this really has a significant impact on, on, on the population as well.
Charli: Indeed, when I was on the ground in Ouarzazate, driving in the car with Imrane, the rising cost of electricity is something that he told me many ordinary Moroccans are struggling with, including his family. Imrane told me that it costs his household of four 1000 dirhams a month for electricity. That's about €100 or 110 USD. And according to figures from 2021, the median household income in Morocco is about 5000 dirhams. So, 550 bucks. And here in the Moroccan desert, there aren't many months when you don't need to use a fan or AC to stay cool.
Imran tells me it's regularly over 40°C here in Ouarzazate during summer. That's 104 Fahrenheit. And those summer months are getting longer every year.
He tells me about another city nearby called Zagora that gets up to 45, 46°C. That's about 113, 115°F. And hot enough to make you want to live underground. This stifling heat makes the switch away from planet heating. Coal, oil, and gas feel all the more urgent in countries like Morocco.
Places that are already hot and dry to begin with. Since the 1970s, the number of hot days and nights has roughly doubled in North Africa and the Middle East. 50 degree days, once rare, are now becoming more and more likely. And freshwater? Year on year, there's less of it to go around.
Intissar: And Morocco has essentially been experiencing a drought for the past seven years. So, you know, that impacts agriculture. That impacts drinking water for people, that even impacts renewable energy.
Charli: Morocco now ranks among the top 30 countries most at risk of water shortage. According to the World Resources Institute, across the Middle East and North Africa, 83% of the population already live with extremely high water stress, and that figure is expected to rise with climate change.
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To make this whole even more unfair, the entire continent of Africa, home to 1.5 billion people, has only contributed a mere 3% of the historic greenhouse gas emissions that have accumulated in the atmosphere and corrode our climate.
Morocco is keen to break up with coal. It recently pledged to phase out coal power entirely by 2040, and the overhaul from dirty to clean is underway. The Noor solar plant might be the star of Morocco's clean energy transition, but it's just one of a couple dozen solar, wind and hydro mega-projects already built. Another several dozen are in the pipeline.
Intissar: The fact that Morocco has sun, that they have access to wind, that they have access to a number of renewable energy sources, and also that they are close and they have the potential to export to Europe is really a big factor and a big driver in their longer term ambition of exporting to Europe.
Charli: Morocco isn't just looking to power its own economy with renewables. It also wants to generate income by selling that clean power abroad.
Intissar: They need to do two things. First, they need to ensure their own transition to renewable energy, and then they need to figure out how to export to European markets.
Charli: So there's plenty of wind. There's seemingly endless sunlight, and there's enormous demand at home and across the Mediterranean. I feel a 'but' coming...
Intissar: But they face a lot of challenges as well. The thing is, they need more investment.
Charli: That's the key here. Money.
Intissar: The biggest barrier is financial. I think the reality is that Morocco needs more investment in its great capacity. It needs more investment in technology and storage technology. It needs to scale up some of the sources that are able to produce more renewable energy, and so on.
Charli: The cost of renewable energy technology has fallen dramatically and it's expected to just keep plummeting because unlike coal, oil and gas technology is something that we can keep improving. But even as solar panels and wind turbines get cheaper, building large scale, clean energy systems like Noah still takes serious upfront investment for low income countries. One study from June 2025 found that building a fully renewable energy system across Africa would cost about 7.3 trillion USD over the next 30 years. It also found that it would save the continent $8.3 trillion on fuel costs over the same period, so the transition pays for itself and then some.
Still, those trillions have to come from somewhere. Morocco doesn't have heaps of extra capital to go around. In 2024, the country's GDP was 154 billion USD. The United States GDP was $30 trillion. So like many poorer countries, Morocco needs help from wealthier nations. The same nations who built their wealth by burning fossil fuels at the expense of a healthy climate for the entire world.
Another study published in Nature Sustainability in 2023, tried to put a figure on what those rich countries actually owe for polluting the atmosphere. It found that collectively industrialized countries have overused their fair share of the global carbon budget, and by 2050, if net zero is reached, they'll owe the rest of the world 192 trillion USD as compensation. But so far, even though rich countries have made pledges at global climate talks to help other countries leapfrog fossil fuels, this debt remains largely unpaid.
Intissar: I mean, Morocco is one of those countries. They can't go. They can't go it alone in terms of their energy transition. None of these, you know, middle or low income countries can.
Charli: There is also the question of how these megaprojects are built. Desert power plants and offshore wind projects probably conjure images of wide, empty spaces, free of people, free of politics. But that's very much not the case. People live here, and many of them are not that happy with how they've fared in Morocco's clean energy buildout.
This brings us back to the newer solar power plant just outside Ouarzazate, which, despite being hailed as a huge win for Morocco's economy, its power sector and its transition... according to Imrane, it's not actually that popular among the local community and surrounding villages.
Imrane estimates that about 70% of locals are unhappy with it and feel left out. People were promised jobs and cheaper electricity that never came, he says.
We pick up an elderly man on the side of the road dressed in a long, silky blue djellaba. He holds a walking stick and a colorful shopping bag.
The man is 83. Imrane tells me he's been waiting all morning for a ride into town. There are no buses out here, just one taxi that passes through once a day. I ask him what he thinks of Noor, Imrane translates. The solar power plant has not changed his life for the better. Far from it. Only a few people got jobs out of it, he says. And for people living in the villages here, electricity is still very expensive and work hard to come by. Plus, to even get electricity, people living in these remote villages near the power plant can only activate their connection by using prepaid cards. If they need more electricity, they need to travel all the way into the city of Ouarzazate to top up these cards. That has not changed with the arrival of Noor. The old man also says that the presence of the solar tower, with all of its mirrors and its concentrated sunlight, has driven up temperatures in their villages.
Imrane takes us past the region's primary water source. It's a shrinking lake that feeds three cities and the solar plant itself. The elderly man says that it used to stretch right to where we're standing now. Today, from where we are, you have to squint to make out the narrow strip of water in the distance.
From Imrane's perspective, the Noor plant is just another reminder that the Moroccan government is not interested or invested in protecting its poorest citizens, no matter if the energy output is dirty or clean.
In fact, 8000 villagers reportedly lost their access to collective pasture in 2010 when the company behind Noor acquired the land to build it. And when I ask Intesa about this, she tells me it's not an isolated case in Morocco.
Intissar: Yeah. So the short answer is not much. Probably not at all. The local communities generally don't get much of a say and don't get a lot of consultation process now. There are efforts to involve, you know, civil society groups and to sort of work through some community organizers, etc. those, I would say are very much the exception. That's definitely not the rule when it comes to this.
Charli: Though Noor is a point of pride for the Moroccan government. Intissar believes that it's a mistake to leave communities out of the energy transition process.
Intissar: They need labor only at the outset when they are being installed. They don't need much labor in terms of maintenance as such, so the source is not producing a lot of labor for the local community. So there's not a lot of economic benefits and economic growth for the local community. So I think a lot of this development needs to pay more attention to the needs of the communities. It needs to have more efforts to actually give back to the local communities and certainly to consult with them at the outset. And that's still not a widely practiced approach.
Charli: Researchers and civil society organisations have also been critical of the government's focus on mega-projects like Noor. Instead of focusing on more decentralised, small scale clean energy projects and prioritizing rooftop PV panels for homes, businesses and farms.
Concentrated solar power, the main technology at Noor, is really water intensive.
Each night, the millions of mirrors need to be cleaned with water to remove sand and dust build up that get in the way of their ability to reflect light. Every year it consumes about 3,000,000m³ of water, which is enough to fill 1200 Olympic size swimming pools. In that way, this technology does seem like an odd choice for this region, which, like much of Morocco, is very dry and drought prone.
Intissar: The interesting thing about Noor is that it, you know, it was an experiment. They also thought they were making a strategic choice by spending a little bit more on the concentrated solar technology because it has greater potential for storage, etc..
Charli: And that last point brings us to one more piece of the puzzle that I want to highlight before we leave you. It's an important one.
Intissar: There's this discrepancy between what Morocco is capable of producing and between what is actually being used.
Charli: Morocco currently has enough renewable technology to generate 46% of its electricity cleanly, but last year only 26% of the electricity it produced was from clean sources.
Why? Because they couldn't store it and they couldn't transmit it. In other words, there's more power that's just not reaching people. This problem is not unique to Morocco, but in a world where every kilowatt hour of fossil fueled power that's replaced by a renewable one has such an impact. That kind of loss feels like a crying shame.
Intissar: The actual output in the country's ability to integrate what nor produces remains quite limited. And then again, that's because Morocco still needs to invest in its grid capacity so they can integrate more of these renewable energies into daily use. They need to invest into storage and storage technology.
Charli: And if Morocco's grid was more up to the task of distributing the energy that it's generating, it would also be much easier for ordinary people to benefit from rooftop solar panels that could eventually provide far cheaper electricity.
Intissar: The bottom line is that, you know, Noor and so on. These are great flagship projects that prove the extent of Morocco's technical capabilities. But they also again highlight that challenge that even with these massive investments, renewables is still struggle to displace the entrenched coal and fossil fuel generation.
Charli: The thing is, power generation is just one side of the coin. The other, the one that determines whether clean power actually reaches people is transmission. Getting power to the people. In some ways, it's arguably the trickier piece of the puzzle. How do you connect everyone and everything to reliable, clean power sources while avoiding bottlenecks and blackouts?
Next week, in part two of our special miniseries, The Switch, we're taking a look at the cracks in the grid and what we've got to do to fill them.
Teaser clip: You can still have a whole lot of wind and solar, but it's not going to go anywhere unless you have this spinal cord going down the middle that actually transmits Myths. The wind and solar or the movement of those bones?
Charli: That's coming up next week on Living Planet in part two of our special mini series. I'm Charli Shield. This episode was written and produced by me. It was edited and mixed by Neil King. Our sound engineer was Juergen Kuhn. Thank you so much for listening.
You can send us your feedback via email to livingplanet@dw.com. Or you can leave us a comment on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen to Living Planet. And we're also now on Speak Pipe, which is where you can send us a voice memo super easily. Just go to speakpipe.com/livingplanet and press record. We listen to all messages and we can't wait to hear from you. See you next week for part two of The Switch.
Please note this transcript of the episode has been generated with the help of AI and may contain errors.
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