Mobile phones: Spanish troubles drag down Vodafone

Vodafone became the latest victim of the slowdown yesterday as the mobile group warned that its annual revenues would be at the bottom end of forecasts.

The revision - mainly caused by falling sales in Spain - shocked the City and sent shares down almost 14% to close at 129p, making it the biggest percentage faller in the FTSE 100. It cast a shadow over the departure of chief executive Arun Sarin, who is stepping down next week after five years at the helm.

Ericsson also suffered from a Vodafone effect, with shares down 11% despite reporting better than expected quarterly earnings figures.

Although Vodafone said results were in line with expectations, and reiterated guidance on operating profit and cash flow, it said full-year revenues were likely to be at the lower end of its previously stated range of £39.8bn to £40.7bn.

The company said trouble at its Spanish operations had dragged European organic revenues down by 0.2% year on year in the three months to the end of June. With more than 16 million customers, Spain is one of the company's four main European markets, along with the UK, Italy and Germany. Service revenues in Spain were down 2.5% in the quarter, contrasting with 8.1% growth over the course of last year.

Jonathan Groocock, an analyst at Investec, said the evidence of slowdown in Spain "shatters the widespread perception that the company is immune to an economic slowdown".

"Perhaps it was always too good to be true," said Mark James at Collins Stewart. "The Spanish and UK telecoms markets, resilient to the economic slowdown to date, finally look to have cracked."

Sarin said Vodafone had suffered from a "relatively severe macroeconomic environment". "We are not immune to it but we are much more resilient than most other companies. If anyone thought we were immune, that would have been a mis-thinking about how we operate."

He said one problem in Spain was that migrant workers who had been working in construction were returning home.

"Migrants and small-to-medium-size companies have taken a lot of share. But here comes the downturn - there's less construction work and some migrants have gone home. But it's not a business that's falling apart, it's a segment within that business."

He said in the UK - where service revenues for the quarter were up 2.1% thanks to data and messaging, but revenues from phone calls fell by 4.4% - the main difficulty was competition from other mobile networks.

Sarin said earnings would be protected by the company's cost-reduction plans and the strength of the euro against the pound could, on current trends, benefit the company by as much as £750m over the six months to the end of September.

Revenues for eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific were up 9.2% on an organic basis in the quarter. Overall Vodafone added 8.5 million subscribers in the quarter, taking the company's customer base to around 269 million. Group revenues rose 19% to £9.8bn in the quarter, with overall organic growth of 1.7%.

I envy young academics embarking on their careers in 2008. Only older generations, enshrouded in what will look to posterity like the second dark age of Western Civilisation, can appreciate the luminosity of the new dawn into which those young scholars are sailing.

What we are witnessing this year is the beginning of the greatest act of recovered memory in the history of our species. The next decade will be the age of the unimaginably vast archive. More particularly, the dynamic and usable archive. The archive, that is, which hurls its contents at you, rather than requiring laborious spadework.

Coming down from the metaphorical heights, the Google Library Project is principally what I'm thinking about. It rolls out this year and will connect, at infinite points, with an array of other digitised knowledge stores and electronic catalogues, covering every discipline from Archaeology to Zoology.

When the GLP has finally hovered up its 5m volumes from the great libraries of the Anglophone world (is that a Gallic moan of pain I hear?) scholars will move across their subjects with the ease and grace of skaters on an ice rink.

It was not always so.

To reminisce: I did my PhD, in the aforementioned dark age (the 1960s) on the literary remains of the Victorian novelist Thackeray. Remains was the right word. I might as well have been carrying an exhumer's shovel. But intellectually it was the most blissful period of my life. The novelist had been popular in America and scraps of his compositional material had landed up in dozens of far-flung libraries. One had to forage, travelling by Greyhound bus, eating in greasy spoons, staying in cheap cockroach-ridden motels, filling notebook after notebook with pure lode. A eureka every working day.

It took me (using the long vacations, and whatever grant money I could scrounge) seven years to complete Thackeray at Work. Now I could write that dissertation, without ever stirring my buttocks in (as I reckon) a quarter of the time. Everything I "discovered", feeling all the while like the Columbus of Thackeray studies, is nowadays a click away online. Or, at worst, available by email-order, Fedex and Xerox in days.

But what, I ask myself, would I do with the five years which had been saved?

More research, of course. Another two buttock-aching monographs, perhaps. Would I be as happy as I was, finishing my Thackeray opus? Probably not. I used to think it was a good day if I dispatched five pieces of mail. Now it's fifty. Before lunch, often. So too with scholarship. The wheel turns ever faster. And, after 2008, it will whir.

Not figure skating, but hamsters in cages comes to mind.

What glorious innovations like the GLP mean is much more material, and much less time to deal with any part of that material. The archive is ever longer, professional life immutably as short as it ever was. The answer? Faster, faster, faster.

What used to be legwork is now time-management. And what we (I mean "they", of course - the upcoming generation) will urgently need are navigational aids. Something equivalent, that is, to a scholar's Tom-Tom, or GPS. A knowledge management system: let's call it KMS.

"System" is the key. A couple of weeks ago the Society of Indexers (SI) held their annual conference. Modern indexing, although few academics are aware of the fact, is a wholly British invention. It's credited to Henry B. Wheatley (1838-1917), author of What is an Index? (1879) and How to Make an Index (1902) - the Old Testaments of the Indexer's craft.

One of the reasons that British research is so world-beatingly good is that our indexes have been world beaters for a hundred years. We have the best maps.

The debate raging (genteely) at this year's SI conference was on free text "searching" (ie what you get when you use Google) versus classic closed text indexing (ie what you'll find at the back of any well-produced book). Put bluntly, can the chip robotise the production of knowledge in the same way that it has robotised car production lines?

Production is different from navigation. What do you feel when you suddenly realise, on the Docklands Light Railway, that, unlike every other train in the underground system, there is no driver? A pang of unease? Do you really, in your heart of hearts, trust the machine which has no human hand on its levers?

So too with free-text mechanical search systems. And, with the GLP, the unease may well be justified. The best test of this is to call up a book you've written yourself and which has been Google-ised. In my case, I found the entry menu thrown up by the Project impressive, but in some ways defective. It made a big hoo-ha, for instance, about "places mentioned", which enabled a pretty graphic link to Google Earth. But that information is of peripheral interest in most books. Certainly in mine. There was a serious optical reading error: the name of a key figure in the narrative (a biography of the poet Stephen Spender in this particular case) was misspelled. The robot lens is less trustworthy than the human eye on occasion. The system had chosen the wrong edition to install, one which contained errors (one possibly libellous) which had been corrected in subsequent editions.

To its credit, the GLP (although it works on embedded indexing systems) retains original pagination, which makes any print-version index usable.

This is technical stuff - and the current imperfections will doubtless be ironed out over time. Nowhere is the hamster running faster than in silicon valley's treadmills. But, for the moment, the scholar may be skating on thin ice. The human touch (and human on-the-page analysis) retains its vital value if we want to find our way through the ever-enlarging info-mass.

There is a larger issue. As the president of the American Society for Indexing, Fred Leise, explained, the GLP indexes operate by means of what is called a "control vocabulary" assigned to every single text. Obviously, a brute-force word search through 5m vols looking for, say, "England" will come up with haystacks not needles. But who controls that control vocabulary, and the gateway to information? Google. And they who control it, control knowledge. Ask yourself, what would the Chinese government do with this tool?

Individual, human, indexers are as necessary to the university world of the future as index fingers are to our bodies. Far from being superseded, indexers are the future pilots of scholarship. At the moment they are the exploited Bob Cratchits of the academic enterprise.

A number of immediate steps could be implemented. Every contract for an academic book should contain a clause along the lines of "the publisher undertakes to supply an index drawn up to British and international standards and to enter that index into a central public domain register" (at the moment, indexing is typically made the author's responsibility, which is why there are so many bad ones). Every learned journal should have its annual contents indexed and entered in the same way.

In short, scholars of the future will need to know where they are going. And the "knowledge", as with London taxi drivers, will be primarily navigational. Choose your metaphor: indexers are the string that leads us out of the labyrinth; they are the pathfinder's flares; they are Harry Potter's owl. They are necessary.

· The proceedings of the 2008 Society of Indexers' Conference (and a directory of specialist indexers) can be found at www.indexers.org.uk

Vast farms of solar panels in the Sahara could provide clean electricity for the whole of Europe, according to EU scientists working on a plan to pool the region's renewable energy.

Harnessing the power of the desert sun is at the centre of an ambitious scheme to build a €45bn (£35.7bn) European supergrid that would allow countries across the continent to share electricity from abundant green sources such as wind energy in the UK and Denmark, and geothermal energy from Iceland and Italy.

The idea is gaining political support in Europe, with Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, recently backing the north African solar plan.

Because the sunlight is more intense, solar photovoltaic panels in north Africa could generate up to three times the electricity compared with similar panels in northern Europe.

Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission's Institute for Energy explained how electricity produced in solar farms in Africa, each generating around 50-200 megawatts of power, could be fed thousands of miles to European countries. The proposed grid would use high-voltage direct current (DC) transmission lines, which lose less energy over distance than conventional alternating current (AC) lines.

The idea of developing solar farms in the Mediterranean region and north Africa was given a boost by Sarkozy earlier this month when he highlighted solar farms in north Africa as central to the work of his newly formed Mediterranean Union.

Depending on the size of the grid, building the necessary high-voltage lines across Europe could cost up to €1bn a year every year till 2050, but Jaeger-Walden pointed out that the figure was small when compared to a recent prediction by the International Energy Agency that the world needs to invest more than $45tn (£22.5tn) in energy systems over the next 30 years.

A tiny rectangle superimposed on the vast expanse of the Sahara captures the seductive appeal of the audacious plan to cut Europe's carbon emissions by harnessing the fierce power of the desert sun.

Dwarfed by any of the north African nations, it represents an area slightly smaller than Wales but scientists claimed yesterday it could one day generate enough solar energy to supply all of Europe with clean electricity.

Speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission's Institute for Energy, said it would require the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle East deserts to meet all of Europe's energy needs.

The scientists are calling for the creation of a series of huge solar farms - producing electricity either through photovoltaic cells, or by concentrating the sun's heat to boil water and drive turbines - as part of a plan to share Europe's renewable energy resources across the continent.

A new supergrid, transmitting electricity along high voltage direct current cables would allow countries such as the UK and Denmark ultimately to export wind energy at times of surplus supply, as well as import from other green sources such as geothermal power in Iceland.

Energy losses on DC lines are far lower than on the traditional AC ones, which make transmission of energy over long distances uneconomic.

The grid proposal, which has won political support from both Nicholas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown, answers the perennial criticism that renewable power will never be economic because the weather is not sufficiently predictable. Its supporters argue that even if the wind is not blowing hard enough in the North Sea, it will be blowing somewhere else in Europe, or the sun will be shining on a solar farm somewhere.

Scientists argue that harnessing the Sahara would be particularly effective because the sunlight in this area is more intense: solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in northern Africa could generate up to three times the electricity compared with similar panels in northern Europe.

Much of the cost would come in developing the public grid networks of connecting countries in the southern Mediterranean, which do not currently have the spare capacity to carry the electricity that the north African solar farms could generate. Even if high voltage cables between North Africa and Italy would be built or the existing cable between Morocco and Spain would be used, the infrastructure of the transfer countries such as Italy and Spain or Greece or Turkey also needs a major re-structuring, according to Jaeger-Walden.

Southern Mediterranean countries including Portugal and Spain have already invested heavily in solar energy and Algeria has begun work on a vast combined solar and natural gas plant which will begin producing energy in 2010. Algeria aims to export 6,000 megawatts of solar-generated power to Europe by 2020.

Scientists working on the project admit that it would take many years and huge investment to generate enough solar energy from north Africa to power Europe but envisage that by 2050 it could produce 100 GW, more than the combined electricity output from all sources in the UK, with an investment of around €450bn.

Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK's chief scientist, welcomed the proposals: "Assuming it's cost-effective, a largescale renewable energy grid is just the kind of innovation we need if we're going to beat climate change."

Jaeger-Walden also believes that scaling up solar PV by having large solar farms could help bring its cost down for consumers. "The biggest PV system at the moment is installed in Leipzig and the price of the installation is €3.25 per watt," he said. "If we could realise that in the Mediterranean, for example in southern Italy, this would correspond to electricity prices in the range of 15 cents per kWh, something below what the average consumer is paying."

The vision for the renewable energy grid comes as the commission's joint research centre (JRC) published its strategic energy technology plan, highlighting solar PV as one of eight technologies that need to be championed for the short- to medium-term future.

"It recognises something extraordinary - if we don't put together resources and findings across Europe and we let go the several sectors of energy, we will never reach these targets," said Giovanni de Santi, director of the JRC, also speaking in Barcelona.

The JRC plan includes fuel cells and hydrogen, clean coal, second generation biofuels, nuclear fusion, wind, nuclear fission and smart grids. De Santi said it was designed to help Europe to meet its commitments to reduce overall energy consumption by 20% by 2020, while reducing CO² emissions by 20% in the same time and increasing to 20% the proportion of energy generated from renewable sources.

Backstory

High voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines are seen as the most efficient way to move electricity over long distances without incurring the losses experienced in alternating current (AC) power lines. HVDC cables can carry more power for the same thickness of cable compared with AC lines but are only suited to long distance transmission as they require expensive devices to convert the electricity, usually generated as AC, into DC. Modern HVDC cables can keep energy losses down to around 3% per 1,000km. HVDC can also be used to transfer electricity between different countries that might use AC at differing frequencies. HVDC cables can also be used to synchronise AC produced by renewable energy sources.

It was the Royal Shakespeare Company that really made me fall in love with the web. I'd been doing a little blogging on the side, for the Guardian, for a while. I was even rather an early adopter, as the paper's erstwhile Backrow Blogger, reporting on those aspects of the arts that don't exactly qualify as news, from irritating conductors' tics to overcrowded art galleries. But this spring I set myself the challenge of blogging my way through all of Shakespeare's history plays, 24 whole hours of them, from the RSC's productions at the Roundhouse in London. During each interval, and in every break between plays, I sat hunched over my laptop, writing about what I'd just seen. I would never pretend that what I was doing was criticism; but, it was an honest, enthusiastic, instant response to what was happening on stage. And it was a hoot.

Live blogging from a theatre production is not, let it be said, anything like live-blogging a television show. Earlier this year Anna Pickard's blogs about The Apprentice for the Guardian drew a deservedly huge audience of people who were, like her, simultaneously watching TV and writing about it. But theatre-goers are, well, at the theatre. On an average night there are far fewer of them than there are people at home watching TV. Nonetheless, the responses sprang up. I heard from people who had seen the history plays back in 1963, the epoch-making Wars of the Roses cycle directed by John Barton. Someone calling him or herself Athelard, a student who had watched the entire cycle at Stratford-upon-Avon some weeks earlier, weighed in with a number of incisive observations. Ian Shuttleworth, a theatre critic for the Financial Times, even brought his expertise to bear on the conversation. And, while I was sitting on the Roundhouse terrace, tapping away, a member of the cast came up and introduced himself - was I the woman from the Guardian doing the blog? Some of the actors in the show, it turned out, had been following my (or, rather, their own) progress online. That was slightly disconcerting, as well as flattering - but entirely appropriate to a grand-scale piece of theatre-making that seemed to draw both performers and audience into a single community as the eight plays unfolded.

So after four years as this paper's arts correspondent, a reporter who tried to fit blogging in around the edges of my life, I'm about to move online. From this week, blogging will take its place at the heart of what I do. Why, apart from all of the above? Well, as a form, the blog is fantastically elastic - a quality that cannot fail to be seductive to a writer. Everything is up for grabs. A blog can be everyday, whimsical, deeply serious or all three; it can be published instantly (clearly a boon to journalists); it can be experimental.

Alex Ross, the classical music critic of the New Yorker who blogs at therestisnoise.com, has described his own gradual discovery, some years back, of blogs that weren't just repositories for trivia about Star Wars (not that there's anything wrong with that), but which contained serious writing about music. There was Jeremy Denk, for example, a professional pianist who, aside from posting hilariously eccentric pieces about yoghurt or waiting in airport queues, also offered in-depth musicological analyses of work he was approaching as a performer, alongside musical quotations and sound files. Ross has said he found the tide of these blogs by performers particularly intriguing, as potentially distant figures were gradually demystified through their presence online.

When I wrote about the RSC's history plays, I was a greenhorn; RSC actor Nick Asbury had long been keeping a spirited online account of the ups and downs of being a cast member, another way in which the history plays - the very directorial conception of which involved breaking down barriers between actors and audience - created a community around its productions. The internet has proved a particularly rich and rewarding forum for less mainstream culture, or at least those aspects of our culture whose fans and practitioners are sufficiently thinly spread as to preclude large amounts of space in newspapers. Classical music is a good example: the internet has meant that devoted fans of composer Brian Ferneyhough, let's say, can communicate cheaply, easily and in depth, whether they are in Alaska or Amsterdam. Classics - another discipline whose devotees are sprinkled across the globe - is another, with historian Mary Beard's blog, A Don's Life, attracting a lively following.

As a journalist covering the arts, the possibilities are endless - and still relatively untapped. If I want to break a story, I can break a story. If I want to write about, say, a Bayreuth Ring cycle as it unfolds, then there's nothing to stop me. If I've a niggle to air, or an argument to develop, or some random enthusiasm to share - then why not? If I want to point to pictures, or play some music, or point to some film footage, all this can be done. If I want to venture outside the office, outside London - and I do - then all I need is me, my laptop and a broadband connection. I'll be building a home for the stuff a newspaper can't always accommodate - the gossip, the heard-on-the-street snippets, the recommendations, the more specialist information, the flotsam and jetsam that often reveal more about the worlds I encounter than the longest, most considered article. Needless to say, suggestions are very welcome - please post them on my blog.

That's another thing. This new journey is not one that will be undertaken in isolation, but in the company of you, the readers. I don't expect this to be a comfortable ride. For a long time, journalists have been largely insulated from the direct reactions of readers, and to find your loose arguments or baggy thinking being painfully held to account can be a shock to the system. On the whole, I've found this part of the experience a rewarding one. Who wouldn't want a stream of ideas and arguments to come their way? The benefits of conversation and community outweigh any demerits; I'd rather be in the thick of things than loftily dispensing words into an apparent vacuum.

My blog is, of course, a small and extremely insignificant part of a revolution in the arts, and in the way newspapers now cover them. One consequence has been the ongoing debate about the status of "amateur" bloggers compared with the work of "professional" critics: will bloggers make critics redundant? Will critics increasingly fetch up as bloggers? In the US, this debate has been accompanied by the sacking of an enormous number of arts reviewers from newspapers. But I don't think the two are polar opposites. For a start, many bloggers are professional critics, not least Ross and his colleague at the New Yorker, pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones; and not all professional critics offer uniformly excellent criticism.

When I wrote about the RSC shows, one of the cast said: "It's like being reviewed as we go through." I was shocked: I felt I was offering a response, as valid as anyone else's - but, bluntly, not as a reviewer. Everyone can offer a response to an artwork; real criticism requires knowledge, experience, time, literary skill and insight. I see no signs that criticism is under threat in the UK, and if ever it were I would be the first to the battle line. For now, though, I am very happy to be breaking down boundaries, stepping on toes, genre-bending and throwing everything up in the air - all in a blog

· guardian.co.uk/charlottehiggins

BSkyB is hoping to revolutionise music consumption as it did television after announcing a tie-up with the world's biggest record label to launch an "all you can eat" digital service that will compete with Apple's iTunes.

Having signed up Universal, home to U2, Duffy and Amy Winehouse, as an equity partner in the new business, the pay TV group is also believed to be close to similar deals with other labels.

The new service, scheduled to launch this year, will combine an unlimited on-demand jukebox service with a set number of monthly downloads that can be saved, even if users stop subscribing, for a single monthly charge.

The announcement will also be seen as a positive move in breaking the deadlock between ISPs and record labels over a future model that will reduce piracy and establish new revenue streams.

Sky said it would be "competitively priced" against rivals such as Apple.

Others, including Napster, have launched subscription services but they have failed to become mass market players because of digital rights management issues that left them incompatible with the market-leading iPod and also because consumers were wary of the idea.

But Sky is confident it can make its service user-friendly. All the downloadable tracks on the service, which does not yet have a name but is likely to be Sky branded, will be free of DRM.

The shift towards DRM-free tracks is expected to open up the digital marketplace, with Amazon also planning to launch a download service in the UK this year. Sky said the service would be open to all, not only to its existing customers.

But Rob Wells, Universal Music International's senior vice-president of digital, said it was "an inevitability" that Sky would eventually bundle music subscription into its broadband and television packages. He said that once consumers became used to a combination of subscription services and paid-for downloads it would become the dominant way of listening to music.

"This is the future of music consumption, without a shadow of a doubt," he said. Sky was the perfect partner because of its proven track record in "aggregation, subscription and customer service", said Wells.

A British actor who took her battle against her millionaire husband to the internet, posting videos that lambasted him on YouTube and which gained an audience of millions, has been ordered to leave her New York home by a judge who has ruled her behaviour was "spousal abuse".

Tricia Walsh-Smith, 52, whose previous claim to fame had been bit parts in the Benny Hill Show and a play she wrote called Bonkers, had the YouTube videos professionally filmed in the Park Avenue apartment she has shared for 13 years with her husband. In them she claimed Philip Smith, a Broadway producer, 77, was trying to evict her and leave her penniless.

In a six-minute rant, she railed against "male chauvinist pigs" and exhorted "woman warriors" to flock to her cause. She also revealed embarrassing details, notably that he had a stash of the impotence drug Viagra despite the fact they never had sex. The videos attracted more than 4m hits on YouTube.

Smith sued for divorce on the grounds that the videos were a form of spousal abuse, and this week Judge Harold Beeler of New York state supreme court agreed.

He said Walsh-Smith had embarked on a "callous campaign to embarrass and humiliate her husband and his daughters. Smith has been publicly humiliated to an unprecedented extent." Walsh-Smith must quit the apartment within a month. Smith in turn is bound to pay her $750,000 (£375,000) under the terms of their pre-nuptial agreement. "I'm terribly sorry it came to this, but I'm obviously happy with the result," Smith said. Walsh-Smith insists she has no regrets about her dalliance with marital meltdown via the web: "It brought attention to my plight and the plight of a lot of other women."

The scale of the challenge facing Yahoo's embattled management became clear yesterday as the internet company revealed a 19% fall in quarterly profits and admitted that America's weakening economy is hurting online advertising.

Yahoo, which has been at the centre of takeover speculation for much of the year, said that in the three months to June it spent $22m (£11m) on advisers and lawyers to help it fend off Microsoft's unsolicited offer of $47.5bn.

Jerry Yang, the company's founder, said the bid battle had not deterred staff from day-to-day activities, although the firm's profits still fell from $161m to $131m.

"It should be obvious that this has been a challenging period for our employees," said Yang. "But people have remained remarkably focused."

Yahoo said that tough economic conditions had eroded expenditure on display advertising by some clients, particularly those in finance and packaged consumer goods. The company said it remained committed to online searches in spite of Google's widening leadership.

Susan Decker, Yahoo's president, said initiatives such as an application platform, SearchMonkey, provided promising opportunities. "Innovation in search has a long way to go," she said. "Many users still don't get what they want in the first results from their search."

Yahoo's figures came out 24 hours after the company struck a peace deal with billionaire critic Carl Icahn, who was waging a campaign to unseat the entire board. Icahn, who favours a sale to Microsoft, is to become a director.

In unofficial trading after the close of the Nasdaq stockmarket, Yahoo's shares fell by 1.25% to $21.40 - well below the $33 offered by Microsoft's proposed buyout in May. But some said the figures were not as bad as they had feared. Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at stockbroker Sanford Bernstein, said: "These results are poor, but relative to what people were expecting, they're not so bad."

With Icahn on the board, Yahoo's leadership team will face greater pressure than ever to improve the firm's performance or to sell assets such as the company's Asian interests. Yang made it clear that he intends to remain chief executive: "I'm more excited than ever to push Yahoo to the next stage, and I look forward to updating you on progress," he said.

Vast farms of solar panels in the Sahara desert could provide clean electricity for the whole of Europe, according to EU scientists working on a plan to pool the region's renewable energy.

Harnessing the power of the desert sun is at the centre of ambitious scheme to build a €45bn (£35.7bn) European supergrid that would allow countries across the continent to share electricity from abundant green sources such as wind energy in the UK and Denmark and geothermal energy from Iceland and Italy.

The idea is gaining growing political support in Europe with both Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy recently giving backing to the north African solar plan.

Speaking today at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission's Institute for Energy, said it would require the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle Eastern deserts to provide all of Europe's energy needs.

In addition, because the sunlight in this area is more intense, solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in northern Africa could generate up to three times the electricity compared with similar panels in northern Europe.

Jaeger-Walden explained how electricity produced in solar farms in Africa, each containing power plants generating around 50-200MW of power, could be fed thousands of miles across European countries by using high-voltage direct current transmission lines instead of the traditional alternating current lines. Energy losses on DC lines are far lower than AC ones where transmission of energy over long distances is uneconomic.

"If you look at solar radiation, then the Mediterranean region is a very favourable one," said Jaeger-Walden.

He said that the proposed grid was a way to balance out the intermittencies of renewable energy: "If you can connect the grid to hydro power, you've got that as a backup battery, and in addition there's wind. It's not a single source that's providing the energy but a combination of the different renewable energies."

Conveniently the potential to generate solar energy, either from photovoltaic cells, or by using it to heat water, is at its highest exactly when there is peak demand. "Between 11am and 1pm - there are a lot of cooking activities going on, people are going home, air conditioners are used," he said.

The idea of developing solar farms in the Mediterranean region and north Africa was given a boost recently by French president Nicholas Sarkozy earlier this month when he highlighted solar farms in north Africa as a key part of the work of his newly-formed Mediterranean Union.

Depending on the size of the grid, building the necessary high voltage lines across Europe could cost up to €1bn a year every year till 2050 but Jaeger-Walden pointed out that the figure was small when compared to a recent prediction by the International Energy Agency that the world needs to invest more than $45tr (£22.5tr) in energy systems over the next 30 years.

Much of the cost would come in developing the public grid networks of connecting countries in the southern Mediterranean, which do not currently have the spare capacity to carry the electricity that the north African solar farms could generate.

"Even if high voltage cables between North Africa and Italy would be built or the existing cable between Morocco and Spain would be used, the infrastructure of the transfer countries such as Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey also needs a major restructuring," said Jaeger-Walden.

Scientists working on the project admit that it would take many years and huge investment to generate enough solar energy from north Africa to power Europe but envisage that by 2050 it could produce 100 GW, more than the the combined electricity output from all sources in the UK, with an investment of around €450bn.

Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK's chief scientist, welcomed the proposals. "Assuming it's cost-effective, a large scale renewable energy grid is just the kind of innovation we need if we're going to beat climate change. Europe needs to become a zero-carbon society as soon as possible, and that will only happen with bold new ideas like this one. Tinkering with 20th-century technologies like coal and nuclear simply isn't going to get us there."

Jaeger-Walden also believes that scaling up solar PV by having large solar farms could help bring its cost down for consumers. "The biggest PV system at the moment is installed in Leipzig and the price of the installation is €3.25 per watt. If we could realise that in the Mediterranean, for example in southern Italy, this would correspond to electricity prices in the range of 15 cents per KWh, something below what the average consumer is paying."

The vision for the renewable energy grid comes as the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) published its strategic energy technology plan, highlighting solar PV as one of eight technologies that need to be championed for the short to medium term future.

"It recognises something extraordinary - if we don't put together resources and findings across Europe and we let go the several sectors of energy, we will never reach these targets. We need a coordination of research applied to different fields," said Giovanni de Santi, director of the JRC, also speaking in Barcelona.

The JRC plan includes fuel cells and hydrogen, clean coal, second-generation biofuels, nuclear fusion, wind, nuclear fission and smart grids. De Santi said it was designed to help Europe to meet its commitments to reduce overall energy consumption by 20% by 2020 while reducing CO2 emissions by 20% in the same time and increasing to 20% the proportion of energy generated from renewable sources.

High-voltage transmission lines

First developed in the 1930s, High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission lines are seen as the most efficient way to move electricity over long without incurring the losses experienced in normal AC power lines. HVDC cables can carry more power for the same thickness of cable compared with AC lines but are only suited to long-distance transmission because they require expensive devices called static inverters to convert the electricity, usually generated as AC, into DC. Modern HVDC cables can keep energy losses down to around 3% per 1,000km.

Another advantage of HVDC is that it can be used as a link to transfer electricity between different countries that might use AC systems at differing frequencies. Alternatively, the HVDC cables could be used to synchronise the AC currents produced by renewable energy sources such as wind turbine farms.

We human beings get nervous if we don't know what's going on. It's the rule for creating scary stories: the unknown is always more frightening than the known. Think of The Turn of the Screw, or M. R. James ghost stories. They're frightening because, even at the end of the story, the reader still doesn't know quite what happened. And the opposite is true too: once something has been explained, the fear is gone. This is why childhood shows like Doctor Who are paradoxically so comforting: at the end of each story, all the scary things that had us cowering behind the sofa are explained and thus made safe.

People respond to technology in much the same way. Most of us don't really know what's going on inside the black boxes of our computers, games consoles or mobile phones. We entrust to these devices our data, our entertainment, our ability to communicate, but we don't know how they're doing what they're doing. Which makes us afraid. To reduce that anxiety, we need to be given the impression that we do understand, that we can see inside the black box. We like to see a progress bar, a loading screen, or a transition animation. But when putting these elements in place, developers have to take account of some very peculiar quirks of human perception.

Take Windows Vista. In many areas, it outperforms Windows XP, but it doesn't feel that way. In fact, Vista often feels more sluggish. Why? Because the designers at Microsoft haven't addressed the user's perception of Vista's performance.

Human beings, it turns out, don't perceive time in a perfectly linear fashion. We perceive that things are progressing more quickly if that apparent progress is smooth, and if it speeds up towards the end. Because the Vista copy progress bar doesn't move smoothly, and slows down toward the end, it's perceived as slower than it really is. Gmail has done better. Its developers have recently included a loading screen with a progress bar. The transition from the login screen to this intermediate screen makes the load-time feel faster, even if it isn't.

Of course it's not news that human beings are irrational. The peak-end rule of memory formation, for example, says that when we're evaluating experiences in our memories, our evaluations are based purely on how good, or bad, the experience was at its peak, and how it ended. In a similar fashion, when we evaluate software performance, we don't focus on the average response time; instead we focus on the slowest 10% of response times. It's unfair on developers, but if their products are really slow only 10% of the time, users will perceive them as constantly slow.

This is one thing that Apple gets right. When a user clicks an application icon on the iPhone, the phone's graphics unit performs a short transition animation in which the application icons whoosh out of the way before the chosen application is brought up. This gives the impression of quick performance: because we can see that something is happening, the anxiety is reduced. We feel we know what's going on.

Apple may not make perfect systems. It has hardware problems, and distribution problems. But there's a reason that people spend a whole day in the queue to get a new iPhone: Apple understands what makes us happy.