Concentrating Solar Thermal Power (CSP) plants are ideal for providing secure solar power. These types of power plants use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to create heat which is used to produce steam to drive steam turbines and electricity generators.

Heat storage tanks (e.g. molten salt tanks or concrete blocks) can be used to store heat during the day to power steam turbines during the night or when there is a peak in demand. In order to ensure uninterrupted service during overcast periods or bad weather (without the need for expensive backup plants), the turbines can also be powered by oil, natural gas or biofuels.

As an interesting side effect (and of great benefit to local people), waste heat from the power-generation process may be used to desalinate seawater or to generate cooling. The main reason for favouring CSP over photovoltaics is its ability to supply power on demand for 24 hours a day.

PV is more expensive than CSP and needs expensive systems for storing electricity, such as pumped storage. If pumped storage facilities in Europe were to be fed with relatively large amounts of electricity from fluctuating sources from MENA, there would be a need for more power lines and those lines would be under-utilized since they would operate at full capacity for only a few hours each day. 

HVDC transmission is very much more efficient than the use of hydrogen as an energy vector: Using High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission lines, loss of power during transmission can be limited to only about 3% per 1000 km. Although there would be transmission losses up to 15% between MENA and Europe, they are more than offset by the fact that levels of solar radiation in MENA are about twice what they are in southern Europe.

Furthermore there is much less seasonal variation in levels of sunshine in MENA than there is in Europe. The technologies needed to realize the DESERTEC concept have already been developed and some of them have been in use for decades. HVDC transmission lines up to 3 GW capacity have been deployed over long distances by ABB and Siemens for many years.

In July 2007 Siemens won a bid to build a 5 GW HVDC System in China. At the World Energy Dialogue 2006 in Hanover speakers from both companies confirmed that the implementation of a Euro-Supergrid and an EU-MENA-Connection is, technically, entirely feasible. 

Solar thermal power plants have been in use commercially at Kramer Junction in California since 1985. New solar thermal power plants with a total capacity of more than 2000 MW are at the planning stage, under construction, or already in operation.

The Spanish government guarantees a feed-in tariff of about 26 Eurocent/kWh for 25 years, thereby establishing favorable business conditions for CSP in their country. Where there is more sunshine, it is possible to realize cheaper feed-in tariffs, as for example at good locations in Africa, America, China, India, Australia or MENA.

The DLR (German Aerospace Centre) has calculated that, if solar thermal power plants were to be constructed in large numbers in the coming decades, the estimated cost would come down to about 4-5 Eurocent/kWh. Because the costs for raw materials for solar thermal power stations are rising more slowly than the price of fossil fuels,

CSP may become competitive earlier than previously expected. At the moment, production bottlenecks and strong demand are keeping prices high. In order to establish, by 2050, a capacity of 100 GW of exportable solar power in MENA, over and above the domestic needs of sun-belt countries, state support will be required in the initial stages to make the building of power stations and transmission lines attractive to private investors. An approximate investment forecast for the TRANS-CSP scenario has been researched by the DLR.

An orchestrated campaign is being waged against climate change science to undermine public acceptance of man-made global warming, environment experts claimed last night.

The attack against scientists supportive of the idea of man-made climate change has grown in ferocity since the leak of thousands of documents on the subject from the University of East Anglia (UEA) on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit last December.

Free-market, anti-climate change think-tanks such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in the US and the International Policy Network in the UK have received grants totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds from the multinational energy company ExxonMobil.

Both organisations have funded international seminars pulling together climate change deniers from across the globe. Many of these critics have broadcast material from the leaked UEA emails to undermine climate change predictions and to highlight errors in claims that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

Climate sceptic bloggers broadcast stories last week casting doubts on scientific data predicting dramatic loss of the Amazon rainforest. All three stories, picked up by mainstream media, questioned the credibility of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the way it does its work.

A new attack on climate science, already dubbed "Seagate" by sceptics, relating to claims that more than half the Netherlands is in danger of being submerged under rising sea levels, is likely to be at the centre of the newest skirmish in coming weeks.

The controversies have shaken the IPCC, whose chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was subjected to a series of personal attacks on his reputation and lifestyle last week. A poll this weekend confirmed that public confidence in the climate change consensus has been shaken: one in four Britons – 25 per cent – now say they do not believe in global warming; previously this figure stood at 15 per cent.

Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and former chairman of the IPCC, said yesterday that the backlash is the result of a campaign: "It does appear that there's a concerted effort by a number of sceptics to undermine the credibility of the evidence behind human-induced climate change."

He added: "I am sure there are some sceptics who may well be funded by the private sector to try to cast uncertainty." A complicated web of relationships revolves around a number of right-wing think-tanks around the world that dispute the threats of climate change.

ExxonMobil is a key player behind the scenes, having donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past few years to climate change sceptics. The Atlas Foundation, created by the late Sir Anthony Fisher (founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs), received more than $100,000 in 2008 from ExxonMobil, according to the oil company's reports.

Atlas has supported more than 30 other foreign think-tanks that espouse climate change scepticism, and co-sponsored a meeting of the world's leading climate sceptics in New York last March. Called "Global Warming: Was It Ever Really a Crisis?", it was organised by the Heartland Institute – a group that described the event as "the world's largest-ever gathering of global warming sceptics".

The organisation is another right-wing think-tank to have benefited from funding given by ExxonMobil in recent years. A large British contingent was present at the event, with speakers including Dr Benny Peiser, from Lord Lawson's climate sceptic think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF); the botanist David Bellamy; Julian Morris and Kendra Okonski from the London-based International Policy Network; the weather forecaster Piers Corbyn;

Christopher Monckton, a former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher; and Professor David Henderson, a member of GWPF's advisory council. Speakers at the event also included two prominent climate bloggers who associate with Paul Dennis, a 54-year-old climate researcher at the University of East Anglia who has been questioned by police investigating the theft of climate data. In a posting on the blog of the climate sceptic Andrew Montford on Friday,

Mr Dennis insisted: "I did not leak any files, data, emails or any other material. I have no idea how the files were released or who was behind it." But he confirmed that he had been in email contact with Stephen McIntyre, who runs climateaudit.org – a site that was one of the first to receive an anonymous link to the original leaked data from UEA. Mr Dennis said he emailed Mr McIntyre to alert him to a "departmental email saying that emails and files were hacked" and that "police had copies of my email correspondence with Steve McIntyre and Jeff Id [a pseudonym for the climate sceptic Patrick Condon].

They said it was because I had sent the emails that they were interviewing me." The UEA researcher also has connections with another prominent sceptic, Anthony Watts, with whom he has posted and who spoke beside Mr McIntyre. Mr Dennis was not available for comment.

Bob Ward, the policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, said: "A lot of the climate sceptic arguments are being made by people with demonstrable right-wing ideology which is based on opposition to any environmental regulation of the market, and they are clearly being given money that allows them to disseminate their views more widely than would be the case if they didn't have oil company funding."

Dr Richard North, a climate change sceptic and blogger, rejected claims of a conspiracy as "laughable" and denied having any links to vested interests. "Anybody who knows me knows I'm a loner. Nobody tells me what to do or dictates my agenda."

ExxonMobil said in a statement: "We have the same concerns as people everywhere – and that is how to provide the world with the energy it needs while reducing greenhouse gas emissions."