Doesn't seem like you can reasonably charge a car in europe/asia from solar panels in the middle east. You'll be dealing with some pretty nasty transmission losses.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
The only problems are that the day-night cycle still exists and storage is expensive, that it would be a massive capital investment, and that the governments of most countries in the Sahara aren't very stable.
In 2011, France and the US forced a regime-change that resulted in civil war and de-facto partition of the country. I would expect most of that investment has been destroyed by now, and the security situation is unlikely to be stable enough to restart this sort of grand plan for at least a decade.
In the meantime, Morocco (faithful French ally, an absolute monarchy with extremist-Islam undertones) started its own effort, which is now considered to be the largest solar-panel plant in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station
First of all, the oil reserves in Saudi-Arabia aren't going to last forever - but they will need massive amounts of energy to maintain their cities, especially for drinking water. Desalination is ridiculously expensive, and water access will be the war driver in the entire Middle East once climate change really hits. Cover the desert with solar plants, the coasts with desalination plants (and don't care about the brine) => control who gets the electricity and/or the water, control the region. Saudi-Arabia is actually already going pretty far in their fight for regional supremacy, that would fit perfectly.
As for transmitting the energy to Europe/Asia, well... there's technology in the works to synthesize gas (both gasoline and, well, gas) using electricity, which can be fed into the existing gas pipeline infrastructure and thus sold to the wide world.
If you have cheap desalinization capability, why would there be wars over water?
More likely, they'll be centered around points of availability in areas of relative scarcity.
There is, in fact freshwater in the Middle East, just not a lot. Which makes what is there a potential source of contention.
"Cheap" desalinization is like "bargain" chip fab. It's still an inherently expensive proposition.
According to the first link I found about large scale desalination, it can be done for a wholesale price of around $0.58/cubic meter.[1]
For comparison, my local water authority (in a part of the US that is not particularly dry) charges about $0.94/cubic meter.
Without knowing exactly what the difference is between wholesale and retail rates, I feel reasonably confident that desalination technology is currently sufficient to avoid civilization collapse and/or war.
[1]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/534996/megascale-desalina...
Yes. But the experience up until now, is that desalinization is so much more expensive than other water sources, to the point that such plants often get mothballed when the other sources become available again.
https://www.circleofblue.org/2016/asia/water-scarce-regions-...
The problem is you're gonna need energy to operate these plants and you can't scale stuff up infinitely as the brine will kill off marine life and eventually, the water sources will become so salty that they can not be used for desalination any more: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
Which means, once Peak Salt hits, there will be problems. Oh, and desalinating water for drinking purposes is one thing - using it for agricultural demands is a whole different beast. Egypt, for example, already had problems in 2010, and the issue won't get smaller over the decades. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/11/09/egypt.water.s...
Where do you think the water will go? I mean, if it doesn't end up in the ground, or the ocean...
Somewhat OT, but... there has been enormous progress in energy efficient desalination, to the point that Israel has become a net exporter of water. See DOI 10.1016/j.desal.2017.10.033 for more technical information on recent progress desalination.
[1] https://www.wateronline.com/doc/pub-and-hyflux-sign-water-pu... [2] http://www.waterwise.co.za/export/sites/water-wise/downloads...