Billionaire Elon Musk, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 22 January, called for depopulated rural areas of Spain to be transformed into Europe’s “power plant” through the large-scale deployment of solar panels.
After referring to potential solar farms in the United States, he said the same approach could be applied in Europe. “Relatively sparsely populated areas of, for example, Spain and Sicily could generate all the electricity that Europe needs,” he said during an interview with BlackRock chairman and chief executive Larry Fink.
Musk also criticised the Trump administration’s “unfortunate” tariff policy, which taxes imports of solar cells from China and, he argued, makes their rollout across the United States more expensive.
The Tesla CEO and SpaceX owner also said that Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots are already carrying out “simple tasks” in the company’s factories. He predicted they would be capable of more complex work by 2026 and ready for direct sale to the public by 2027.
Turning to artificial intelligence, Musk said that, “at the pace it is advancing”, an AI with human-level intelligence could be developed by the end of 2026, or no later than 2027. He suggested that by 2030 or 2031, it would be “likely” that AI could surpass the combined reasoning abilities of all humanity.
In this context, the South African-born entrepreneur warned of the need for great “caution” around robotics to avoid futures reminiscent of the Terminator franchise. At the same time, he highlighted the vast economic and technological potential of AI.
“If we have robots and free or nearly free AI available everywhere, there will be an explosion in the global economy – a truly unprecedented expansion,” Musk said. “They will more than meet all human needs.”
“A complete extravagance”, according to Aagesen
Spain’s Third Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Sara Aagesen, dismissed Elon Musk’s proposal to turn empty areas of Spain into Europe’s power station with solar panels as “a complete extravagance”.
Speaking to reporters during a visit to the FITUR tourism fair, Aagesen said Spain “clearly knows what it has to do” when it comes to the ecological transition, stressing that the country has been pursuing a well-defined agenda “for a very long time”.
She pointed to an approach rooted in Spain’s natural advantages, such as sun and wind, but added that the transition must, above all, foreground citizens, with a firm commitment to sustainability and territorial balance, and without serving particular interests.
Aagesen also noted that, for the first time last year, wind and solar power generation in the EU surpassed fossil fuels, calling it “a clear commitment to the Green Agenda”.
“This is the trend, and we must continue to support it, because it gives us strategic autonomy and security in a very complex geopolitical context,” she concluded.