Tunisia’s Solar Ambitions

The Tunisian-British partnership TuNur hopes to build one of the world’s largest thermodynamic solar plants here, on collective lands once home to nomadic groups.

TuNur plans to fulfil this ambition by building the world’s largest solar plant. Behind the name are a handful of well-known investors from the City of London who have taken a lively interest in the promise of green finance

With persistently high oil prices and mounting supply challenges, Europe has pragmatically tried to speed its transition to lower-cost renewables ‒ by outsourcing. It covets the bountiful sunlight of its southernmost Mediterranean neighbours whose solar potential is among the highest in the world.

The country, ensnared in a financial crisis, is struggling to achieve its climate objectives. Many foreign investors are hungry for its solar supply – mostly for export to the North. The electricity-generating mirrors may look green, but they reek of an extractivist Europe greedy for its neighbours’ resources – a greener version of fossil fuel exportation.

Passed in 2015 and amended in 2019, law 2015-12 relating to the production of electricity from renewable energy thus liberalised Tunisia’s electricity market, despite fierce labour opposition. Because STEG union members refused to connect the country’s first private photovoltaic plant to the national grid, all renewable energy projects approved by the energy ministry remained at a standstill until late 2022.

Despite the tension between STEG, Tunisian institutions and private companies, TuNur [the Tunisian-British partnership] managed to carve out space in the local market with its 2019 construction of a small photovoltaic facility in Gabès. In August 2022 the company announced an initial $1.6bn investment toward its flagship project.

The TuNur project is in fact modelled on the Noor (‘light’ in Arabic) mega-plant in Morocco’s southeastern desert…The complex, which King Mohammed VI opened in February 2016, is still the world’s largest thermodynamic plant. It symbolises a national policy focused on green energy development. The kingdom boasts that 37% of its electricity comes from renewables, well ahead of what many European countries have accomplished.

Beyond the economic losses it has generated, the plant is also accused of using water-intensive technology in a perpetually water-stressed region where there have been ongoing protests since 2017. Residents decry the appropriation of water resources by major state-promoted agricultural, mining and energy projects.

Farmers and residents complain that water has become increasingly scarce. The lake formed by the El Mansour Eddahbi Dam, which supplies the entire Draa Valley, is used heavily for maintaining the mirrors and for cooling – crucial in this desert setting. Currently at just 12% of its capacity, the lake is the region’s primary source of both drinking water and irrigation.

In the early days of France’s Third Republic, official propaganda used ‘solar conquest’ to symbolise modernity. And the myth never faded: presented as an achievement that could free mankind of its constraints, it continued to inspire literature and the imagination. In the latter half of the 19th century, Augustin Mouchot, a prolific inventor, created a series of steam engines powered by concentrated sunlight. He was among the pioneers who saw North African sunshine’s potential to fuel European industrial expansion.

Mouchot’s solar utopia soon lost momentum because coal, then Europe’s primary energy source, was so cheaply available. The inventor had to halt his research, but the idea of harnessing solar energy survived. It resurfaced throughout the 20th century, eventually becoming the policy centrepiece it is today.

By connecting the solar plants to Europe – via high-voltage cables under the Mediterranean – the industrialists hoped to cover 15% of the continent’s electricity needs by 2050, thereby allowing continental economies to grow ‘in harmony with the environment’. It was to be ‘the greatest idea of the 21st century’.

According to a recent report by the Tunisian Observatory of Economy, most megaproject-related jobs last ‘for the building and startup phases only’. The same ambiguities were at work during the colonial period. Industrialisation was supposed to benefit local populations, whose standard of living would improve – and all the while colonists funnelled their resources to the mainland.

‘This is solar extractivism,’ Bouet says, acknowledging a growing criticism of the projects. The term has typically referred to the significant impact that mining materials such as metals or hydrocarbons, for the exclusive benefit of wealthy countries, has on locals and the environment. In this case, Europe is outsourcing its energy transition while the countries that have historically emitted the most greenhouse gasses dodge responsibility for the current climate crisis.

The shift to renewables … highlights the link between extractivism and authoritarianism.

Full article is on Le Monde Diplomatique, June 2024 issue

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...

Cairo C. 1900-1934 The accurate translation for Arabic meaning of Cairo is "the invincible".

Capitalism

Some of this reminds me of how five or six years ago in a class of seven students in a UK elite university three of them (two Germans and one British) were in favour of a "benevolent dictator" (in the Arab context). The bloody horrors of Pinochet showed how capitalism will react when it's threatened

"If you don't attack the economic power of the elite, soon or later it will attack you." That's what the Arab uprisings, for instance, were unable/failed to do. K for Karl – Revolution (episode 3)

John Gray, the Guardian, 03 March 2015: "To a significant extent, the new atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic." "There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley. None of the divergent values that atheists have from time to time promoted has any essential connection with atheism, or with science. How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time [Nietzsche] argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism." "The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheis...

Varoufakis "speaks of how great it was to have the support of Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, and other figures on the Right, but it was support for whom, for what, and in whose class interests? Class analysis is far from the foreground of the picture sketched out here. Closed rooms and class war

"In the same way that Robinson [Crusoe] was able to obtain a sword, we can just as well suppose that [Man] Friday might appear one fine morning with a loaded revolver in his hand, and from then on the whole relationship of violence is reversed: Man Friday gives the orders and Crusoe is obliged to work. . . . Thus, the revolver triumphs over the sword, and even the most childish believer in axioms will doubtless form the conclusion that violence is not a simple act of will, but needs for its realization certain very concrete preliminary conditions, and in particular the implements of violence; and the more highly developed of these implements will carry the day against primitive ones. Moreover, the very fact of the ability to produce such weapons signifies that the producer of highly developed weapons, in everyday speech the arms manufacturer, triumphs over the producer of primitive weapons. To put it briefly, the triumph of violence depends upon the production of a...

"Egypt is no longer the heart of the Arab world"

Syria Despite the length of the war and the catastrophes it has brought, the deeper forces behind Syria’s conflict remain poorly understood, even on the Left. The protagonists are too often seen in the culturalist terms of “Sunnis vs. Shias,” or “Islamists vs. Secularists.” Just as often, the war is reduced to pure geopolitics, with the lead actors assumed to be mere proxies for America and its international opponents (or allies). Rarest of all is any developed discussion of the class dynamics that shaped the Syrian state and society even before the 2011 conflict. Yet these had a decisive effect on the uprising and the regime’s ability to withstand it. Grasping these social elements of the conflict is just as important today if we want to understand the Assad regime’s strategy for the “new Syria,” and how it intersects with the plans of his Russian and Syrian allies.

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