TuNur solar project in Tunisia is a joint venture between Nur Energy a solar plant developer based in the UK and a group of Maltese and Tunisian investors in the oil and gas sector. In July 2017, a request for authorization was filed to the Tunisian Ministry of Energy, Mines and Renewable Energy for an export-oriented solar project with a capacity of around 4.5 GW. [1] Activists have branded this project as another renewable energy grab or what has been termed ‘Green Grabbing’: the appropriation of land and resources for purportedly environmental ends. This project in particular involves massive land grabs (10,000 hectares) as well as extensive water usage to clean and cool the panels in arid and semi-arid regions to export energy to the UK and Europe. Given that Tunisia depends on its neighbor Algeria for its energy needs and faces increasingly frequent power cuts, activists claim that it would be outrageous and unjust to prioritize exports over the urgent needs of local people. [1] According to Med Dhia Hammami, a Tunisian investigative journalist working in the energy sector, the project seeks to take advantage of new Tunisian legislation allowing the liberalization of green energy production and distribution and opening the way to the direct export of electricity by private companies. [5] The EU is already considering awarding priority status to an underwater cable linking Tunisia with Italy, and TuNur expects construction work on a €5bn plant to begin by 2019 in southwest Tunisia. The resulting solar complex would sprawl over an area three times the size of Manhattan, harnessing the power of the Saharan sun with several towers up to 200m tall.
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]
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