Welcome to Grand Challenges from nature.

Grand Challenges is our Roundtable series

in which a panel of experts takes on the biggest challenges facing society

and asks what scientists, governments, charities, even you and I

should be doing to try and solve them.

I'm Adam Levy and in this episode, Energy.

In the heart of Morocco lies a small city called Wuzazat.

This city is flanked by inhospitable terrain.

To its north, the high atlas mountains.

To its south, the Sahara Desert.

Fifteen kilometres outside the city lies a particularly barren piece of land.

There was nothing, really nothing. It was really a deserted area.

This is Yusuf Stitou.

He's a project manager for the Moroccan Energy Agency, Mazen.

Yusuf worked on a huge solar plant that has breathed new life into this desolate land.

Now it's really a change. It has a value now.

This value comes from rows upon rows of parabolic mirrors that cover the site. These mirrors concentrate the heat energy from the sun, ultimately producing steam, which is used to generate electricity.

And this solar power plant is the largest of its kind, in the world.

And the advantage of this technology is that we can store the thermal energy and we can use

it during the night.

And this is very important.

But Morocco needs to do much more in order to power its future.

...