In this way, villagers have daily encounters with extractivism as development and with MASEN as a new governing authority. With Noor, extractive governance and development come intertwined in farming initiatives, road paving, health care campaigns and schooling programs, among other projects. Thus, MASEN is not only a sun harvesting company with global ambitions but also a development agency that generates a discourse on “sustainability” for local consumption. The 2010 massive land acquisition for the Noor project generated over $3.5 million, which was ostensibly designated for infrastructure, job opportunities and development in the Ait Ougrour villages, according to a Ministry of Interior official. This council has the political mandate to inject the revenues back into communities in the form of development projects. Estimated at 15 million hectares nationwide, collective land ( aradi sulaliyya) is a gold mine for the state treasury since its privatization generates revenues that are kept and managed by the Tutelary Council of Collective Land, Majlis al Wissaya, nested in the Ministry of Interior. Since 2007, this mobilization has highlighted the importance of collective land to privatization policies and contested the postcolonial legal and patriarchal regime and institutions that oversee land grabs and revenue distribution. I first visited this flagship project in December 2017 as part of an ethnographic study of the Sulaliyyat movement, a nationwide mobilization of rural women for land rights. After winning the public bid for energy production, a consortium led by the Saudi Arabian company ACWA Power is now developing these solar farms and is tasked with generating electricity for MASEN for 25 years. In its Noor complex of four farms, MASEN uses a variety of complementary solar thermal technologies, including concentrating solar power systems (CPS) at Noor I and Noor II, a power tower system at Noor III and a photovoltaic system (PV) at Noor IV. MASEN supervises the implementation of these goals by erecting renewable energy parks across Morocco, with an eye on Africa’s emerging markets and growing energy needs. The goal is to produce 42 percent of total energy from renewable sources in 2020 and 52 percent by 2030, combined with a 32 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
It is the flagship project of the 2009 National Energy Strategy, a comprehensive policy to reverse Morocco’s quasi dependence on imported fossil fuel through the production of electricity from an energy mix of solar, wind and hydropower. While MASEN’s massive land grab promised development in return, the villagers explain that it also deprived their communities of “ancestral pasture, disrupting old paths of circulation between our villages and extending our travel time to Ouarzazate.” Ĭreated in 2010 as a private company with public funds, MASEN started as the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy and was renamed the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy in 2016. Nevertheless, the deal was approved by the Ghassat Communal Assembly, which represents the seven Ait Ougrour Amazigh villages located a few miles away from the city of Ouarzazate in one of the poorest and most water-stressed enclaves of the southeast. MASEN’s narratives about the area revolve around notions of “emptiness, aridity and waste,” which MASEN’s agents use to legitimate the significantly low purchase price of 15 cents per square meter.
A model of the solar complex in the entrance hall of MASEN at Noor-Ouarzazate.