few hours to provide for humanity’s power needs for a whole year. The challenge, though, has been capturing that energy and transporting it to the population centres where it is required. As engineers put the finishing touches to Noor 1, its 500,000 crescent-shaped solar mirrors glitter across the desert skyline. The 800 rows follow the sun as it tracks across the heavens, whirring quietly every few minutes as their shadows slip further east. When they are finished, the four plants at Ouarzazate will occupy a space as big as Morocco’s capital city, Rabat, and generate 580 mega-watts (MW) of electricity, enough to power a million homes. Noor 1 itself has a generating capacity of 160MW. Morocco’s Environment Minister, Hakima el-Haite, believes that solar energy could have the same impact on the region this century that oil production had in the last. But the $9bn project to make her country’s deserts boom was triggered by more immediate concerns, she said. “We are not an oil producer. We import 94% of our energy as fossil fuels from abroad and that has big consequences for our state budget,” el-Haite told the Guardian. “We also used to subsidize fossil fuels, which have a heavy cost, so when we heard about the potential of solar energy, we thought, 'Why not?'” Solar energy will make up a third of Morocco’s renewable energy supply by 2020, with wind and