If you are using XSLT1.0, you can use a technique called 'Muenchian' grouping to get the distinct measure descriptions, which will form the basis of your head row, and also be used to output the values of each row.
Firstly, you define a key to look up measure elements by their @desc attribute
<xsl:key name="measures" match="measure" use="@desc" />
Then, to get the distinct measure descriptions you can iterate over the measure elements that appear first in the group for their given @desc attribute
<xsl:apply-templates
select="result/measure[generate-id() = generate-id(key('measures', @desc)[1])]"
mode="header" />
Then, for your header, you would simply have a template to output the description.
<xsl:template match="measure" mode="header">
<th>
<xsl:value-of select="@desc" />
</th>
</xsl:template>
For each result row, would do a similar thing, and iterate over all distinct measure values, but the only difference is you would have to pass in the current result element as a parameter, for later use.
<xsl:apply-templates
select="/results/result/measure[generate-id() = generate-id(key('measures', @desc)[1])]"
mode="data">
<xsl:with-param name="result" select="." />
</xsl:apply-templates>
Then, in the template that matched the measure this time, you could access the measure within the result element with a matching @desc attribute (and id there is no such attribute, nothing is output for the cell)
<xsl:template match="measure" mode="data">
<xsl:param name="result" />
<td>
<xsl:value-of select="$result/measure[@desc = current()/@desc]/@value" />
</td>
</xsl:template>
Here is the full XSLT
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:key name="measures" match="measure" use="@desc" />
<xsl:template match="/results">
<table>
<tr>
<th>ID</th>
<th>DESC</th>
<xsl:apply-templates select="result/measure[generate-id() = generate-id(key('measures', @desc)[1])]" mode="header" />
</tr>
<xsl:apply-templates select="result" />
</table>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="result">
<tr>
<td><xsl:value-of select="@id" /></td>
<td><xsl:value-of select="@desc" /></td>
<xsl:apply-templates select="/results/result/measure[generate-id() = generate-id(key('measures', @desc)[1])]" mode="data">
<xsl:with-param name="result" select="." />
</xsl:apply-templates>
</tr>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="measure" mode="header">
<th>
<xsl:value-of select="@desc" />
</th>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="measure" mode="data">
<xsl:param name="result" />
<td>
<xsl:value-of select="$result/measure[@desc = current()/@desc]/@value" />
</td>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Note the use of the mode attributes because you have two templates matching the measure element, which function in different ways.
When applied to your input XML, the following is output
<table>
<tr>
<th>ID</th>
<th>DESC</th>
<th>VOLT</th>
<th>AMPERE</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1</td>
<td>Voltage and current</td>
<td>1.0</td>
<td>2.0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2</td>
<td>Current-1</td>
<td/>
<td>5.0</td>
</tr>
</table>
