Ouarzazate is a beautiful town in south-central Morocco, where ruddy orange earthen Kasbahs stand tall, as they have for centuries, on a high plateau between the snow-topped Atlas mountains which form its backdrop and the Sahara. Nicknamed the ‘door of the desert’, it is also home to the major film sets of Atlas Studios, where films such as Lawrence of Arabia and Gladiator were shot, as well as, more recently, part of the television series Game of Thrones.
It now has another claim to fame however, as just six miles away from the town is one of the biggest solar projects in the world, the Ouarzazate Solar Power Station. This enormous array of solar mirrors, first connected to the grid in 2016, is part of a grand plan to end Morocco’s dependency on energy imports and put the country on a ‘green path’ aimed at meeting 52 per cent of the country’s energy needs from renewable sources by 2030.
The Ouarzazate Solar Power Station (aka Noor I) was connected to the national grid in 2016. Two further phases, Noor II and Noor III were added in 2018 and 2019 respectively. By 2021, the complex was supplying renewable electricity to nearly two million Moroccans, according to the country’s energy minister.
But the Saudi-built and run plant has failed to benefit the impoverished communities that surround it; the Amazigh pastoralists were paid a pittance for the lands used for the 3,000-hectare facility and were not informed of the impact the project would have on scarce water resources. The Ouarzazate plant uses concentrated solar-thermal power (CSP) technology – which uses arrays of mirrors to heat a liquid to high temperatures and drive a turbine – which is water-intensive, diverting the vital resource away from drinking and agriculture in an area that is already semi-arid.1
It’s expensive too. The project is a public-private partnership (PPP) – a euphemism for the privatization of the profits and the socialization of losses through de-risking strategies – and since 2016 has been recording an annual deficit of around $87 million, which comes
