According to Kevin Sara, TuNur’s CEO, the people in the region were supportive of the project which will create around 20,000 jobs and helping in redressing the inequality between Tunisia’s wealthier coastal cities and the underdeveloped interior. With Mohamed Larbi Ben Said of the collective who owns the land stating that “This project provides the economic development necessary for our region and our community; it gives true value to quasi-desert lands in an environmentally sustainable way.” [4][2] 

According to Hamza Hamouchene an Algerian campaigner, writer, researcher, and a founding member of the London-based Algeria Solidarity Campaign (ASC), and Environmental Justice North Africa (EJNA): “Projects like TuNur deny local people control and access to their land, rob them of resources and concentrate the value created in the hands of domestic and foreign predatory elites and private companies.” He considers that the Arab uprisings that started in Tunisia in 2010 were about bread, freedom, social justice and national dignity and that projects like TuNur stand in stark contradiction with these demands. To implement just and truly green projects, which provide for the future of people and the planet, “nature must be taken back from the clutches of big capital and recast the debate around justice, popular sovereignty and the collective good. The priority must be energy autonomy for local communities and a radical democracy that takes precedence over the logic of a market that sees our land and our livelihoods as commodities to be sold to the highest bidder.” [1] Similar initiatives in Tunisia have failed before. In fact, the $400 bn Desertec initiative failed back in 2013. Big engineering-focused ‘solutions’ like Desertec, TuNur and Ouarzazate (in Morocco) tend to present climate change as a shared problem with no political or socio-economic context. North Africa is one of the regions hardest hit by global warming, with water supplies in the area being particularly affected. The spread of solar energy initiatives that further plunder these increasingly-scarce water resources would be a great injustice. [1][2][3] 

Phase 2 of the project consists of modular 2,250MW CSP Tower plant with molten salt storage on the same site in Rjim Maatoug, Southern Tunisia with a dedicated 2,000MW HVDC transmission line from the site, across Tunisia, through the Strait of Sicily, East of Sardinia and the Tyrrhenian Sea, landing North of Rome, Italy. Once landed in Italy power will be transported to offtakers across Europe.