Solar panels are quite inefficient as the radiation shining on the earth surface is over 1 kW per square metre but we will be lucky at midday to manage to capture 100 Watts.  But yet this is a really large amount of energy if we had say a square kilometre of panels.  I calculate it to be 100 MWatts at peak.  Recently I was Chile in the Atacama desert and took attached photo 


Now there are power lines there but we only saw one block of solar panels during our 1000 km trip.   There is no vegetation for animals to eat and no water for trees so the land is just barren a useless waste of space but if used to collect energy a miraculous godsend.  Putting solar panels up in England is wasteful of land that can be used for agriculture and anyway we do not receive the full desert heat that the Sahara can supply.

What if UK were to purchase 10km by 10km or 100 square kilometres of desert which at peak gives 10 gigaWatts of power nearly a quarter of our power needs but how to transmit it is a problem that needs solving unless we do a deal with Gibraltar/Spain sort of import/export deal?.