[en] This study is an attempt to investigate, from a variety of starting points, the market potential for solar thermal power plants. The terms of reference chosen for the central systems parabolic trough and tower plants (30-200 MW_e) seem to be workable. For the decentral dish/Stirling systems (10 kW_e-10 MW_e) a first estimation could be worked out. In addition to collecting data on a large number of parameters relevant to the energy economy, the study also concentrated on: evaluating Meteosat data in order to determine the insolation conditions for each 50 x 50 km square of land in the entire Mediterranean area; making a rough cartographic sketch showing the most significant surface-area related criteria for each country; deriving typical annual, weekly and daily load curves for central and decentral grids from a multitude of country-specific data, and comparing the electricity generating costs of solar thermal and conventional power plants. From this basic data, various potentials (theoretical, available, technical, economic and anticipated) were determined for solar thermal power plants