They talk about the three main uses of sand being concrete, glass and electronics (the third one is actually wrong, only 15 % of silicon produced ends up in the semiconductor industry, the rest is used in metallurgy). I can imagine that one could use desert sand for the last two purposes but don't know how much of an impact that would make.
In most glass production, and in all silicon production you need sand of high chemical purity, desert sand is heavily contaminated with things that are not silicon dioxide.