Plans for vast solar deployment in North Africa exporting clean power to Europe – an ambition as old as the solar industry but so far nothing more – inched forward with an application to the Tunisian government for a 4.5GW project.

A consortium developing the TuNur project hopes to site huge arrays of concentrating solar power (CSP) generation with molten-salt storage in the Sahara desert in southwest Tunisia, exporting the electricity generated to Europe via future undersea transmission links to Malta – the target of a €1.6bn