The Solar Boom In The Middle East
The Middle East’s leading solar energy conference, Intersolar, takes place this September in Dubai … and we’ll be there! CleanTechnica is a 2017 Media Partner.
There has never been a more exciting time for solar power in the Middle East, and this September the Intersolar Conference will bring together all the most important solar power stakeholders in the region. This historical energy hub is now tapping into its abundant sunshine as a path towards a clean, profitable, and independent energy future.
And if you’re interested in solar and EVs, at InterSolar Middle East 2017 there will be a special session on electric vehicles (EV)s underlining their growing importance globally, in the UAE, and around the Middle East. This special e-mobility session is hosted in partnership with GlobalEVRT. Ben Pullen, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Global EVRT and our own Zachary Shahan, Director of CleanTechnica, will be presenting on September 27 at 1:30pm, talking about “The Electric Vehicle Market Today & in 2020.” Our team is looking forward to being a part of this vibrant event for the first time!
Below is a press release from InterSolar Middle East that looks at the move towards more solar in the Middle East.
A wave of solar projects are already underway across the region. According to Frost & Sullivan, the GCC’s installed solar capacity is expected to reach 76 GW by 2020. Egypt is hoping to put 2,650 MW of photovoltaic (PV) capacity online by 2020, Morocco is aiming for 600 MW, while Jordan has 540 MW of PV projects under construction with more expected before the end of 2017.
Solar Opportunities in the Middle East
The Middle East’s PV projects have also taken on a new scale recently, not least at the solar PV plant in Sweihan, Abu Dhabi, UAE. The US$872mn project is set to be world’s largest single location solar farm, with a capacity of 1,177MW, and is expected to reach commercial operation in April 2019. Sweihan, and the many other projects in the pipeline, create considerable opportunities for developers, EPC contractors, equipment suppliers, and financiers interested in the region.
The
Intersolar Middle East Conference, in Dubai on September 26 – 27, will bring together the most knowledgeable and influential figures in the Middle East’s renewable energy sector. Four sessions will focus on utility-scale, ground-mounted and rooftop solar installations, providing insight to all parties interested in PV opportunities in the Middle East. Further discussions will focus on the use of inverters in our increasingly smart power systems, or the innovative use of drones and robots for greater safety and efficiency.
International top players like Talesun Energy, an internationally operating EPC and turnkey solution provider of PV power plants, will showcase their best products and solutions, as well as all the latest solar PV developments from around this global and rapidly evolving industry.
“The solar market is booming in the GCC states and further afield. We wanted to provide the industry with a unique platform, and thus Intersolar started with summits and conferences in the Middle East in 2012,” explains Daniel Strowitzki, CEO of FMMI, one of the organizers. “In the medium term, the MENA states will account for a considerable proportion of the solar energy generated. At our events, we highlight a range of prospects for international companies, enabling them to participate in this development.”
Intersolar Middle East 2017 takes place September 26 – 27 at the Conrad Dubai Hotel in the United Arab Emirates. It is the key event in the Middle East dedicated to the solar industry. The conference is a premier networking platform and has a focus on established, emerging and the ‘untapped’ markets in the MENA region, PV Power Plants, Best Practices, Financing and Business Models. Since being founded, Intersolar has become the most important platform for the global solar industry.
With events spanning four continents, Intersolar is the world’s leading exhibition series for the solar industry and its partners. It unites people and companies from around the world with the aim of increasing the share of solar power in our energy supply.
Intersolar Middle East is the international conference for the solar industry of the Middle East. In 2017, it takes place at the 5-star Conrad Hotel in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
The event’s conference focusses on the areas of photovoltaics, PV production technologies, and energy storage systems. Since being founded, Intersolar has become the most important industry platform for manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, service providers and partners in the global solar industry.
With 25 years of experience, Intersolar has the unique ability to bring together members of the solar industry from across the world’s most influential markets. Intersolar exhibitions and conferences are held in Munich, San Francisco, Mumbai, São Paulo, and Dubai. These global events are complemented by the Intersolar Summits, which take place in emerging and growing markets worldwide. Intersolar Middle East is organized by Solar Promotion International GmbH, Pforzheim and Freiburg Management and Marketing International GmbH (FMMI).
Plans for Sahara to export solar power to Europe revived
TuNur Ltd filed a request in the Tunisian Ministry of Energy, Mines and Renewable Energy for the authorisation of a 4.5GW solar energy export project destined to fuel Europe.
The mega-solar project is envisioned to be located in a newly established solar complex in the Sahara Desert in Southwest Tunisia- a site located close to Réjim Maâtoug in the Kébili Governorate.
The technology that will be used is Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), using parabolic mirrors to heat a tower containing molten salt that in turn heats water to generate steam to run a turbine- a technology that has seen significant cost reductions in the past few years.
According to Daniel Rich, the Chief Operating Officer at TuNur, the initial production costs for the first phase will be $85 million, making the cost 10.1 US-cent/kWh – slightly higher than the upcoming solar CSP project that attracted the world’s lowest bid for CSP at 9.45 US-cent/ kWh.
Mr Rich said: “Today you have a market in need of low carbon dispatchable power, which has the mechanisms to import power from other countries”.
He added: “Next door is a region with extreme solar resource and in need for investment and development. Finally, there are technologies that can satisfy the demand at very competitive pricing and have a very high local impact”.
The project is expected to have 4.5GW installed capacity, and will be divided into three phases with three different routes through HVDC submarine cable systems.
The first cable will link Tunisia with Malta, at a cost of approximately €1.6 billion and will transfer 250-500MW of solar energy.
Malta is already connected to the European mainland with 100 km of undersea power line that transmits electricity to Sicily, Italy- meaning that only the first part of interconnection is needed, i.e. 500 km transmission systems connecting Tunisia to Malta.
The second cable will connect Tunisia straight to central Italy, with a shoring point north of Rome.
This second route is being studied for years, and is being considered as a Project of Common Interest- i.e, projects that are included in EU’s Energy Union vision and are given development priority and financial support.
The Tunisia- Italy route is expected to transfer 2000MW of solar energy.
A third cable which will link Tunisia to the south of France, possibly to Marseille, is under study, and will possibly transfer slightly under another 2000MW.
Kevin Sara, CEO of TuNur underlined that: “ The economics of the projects are compelling: the site in the Sahara receives twice as much solar energy compared to sites in central Europe, thus, for the same investment, we can produce as much electricity”.
“In a subsidy-free world, we will always be a low cost producer, even when transmission costs are factored in”, he commented regarding the significant competitive advantage of Tunisian solar energy production.
According to Daniel Rich, the project is expected to stimulate more than $5 billion of investment in Tunisia, and it will create more than 20,000 direct and indirect jobs.
TuNur Ltd constitutes a private company incorporated in the UK, whose principal shareholders are London-based solar power developer Nur Energie and Tunisian and Maltese investors.
A similar attempt had been realised some years ago, under the famous project Desertec- an initiative led by German investors to export huge amounts of solar from Tunisia to Europe.
The bold initiative had then been abandoned, with one of the reasons having been the political instability in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) regions.
The National reports that similar dangers still lie- one indicative example is the wide grid and border disputes between Algeria and Morocco over the Western Sahara.
http://www.climateactionprogramme.org/news/plans-for-sahara-to-export-solar-power-to-europe-revive
Solar Power Invades Oil-Rich Middle East
Solar energy is becoming a major power player in the Middle East
Credit: ©iStock.com
In a patch of otherwise empty desert 30 miles south of Dubai, the outline of what is expected to become the Middle East’s largest photovoltaic solar project is taking form in the sands of the United Arab Emirates.
The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, launched in 2013 with 13 megawatts of capacity, is expected over the next 15 years to expand to 3,000 MW, providing the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) enough power to meet 15 percent of UAE’s demand.
Nearly 4,000 miles away, on a desert plateau in Morocco, one of the world’s largest concentrated solar power (CSP) complexes is being built in Ouarzazate province, a landscape made famous as a backdrop for Oscar-winning films “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Gladiator,” as well as HBO’s hit series “Game of Thrones.”
The Ouarzazate solar complex, to be developed in three phases, will account for roughly a quarter of the new electricity generation called for under Morocco’s 2,000 MW solar development program launched in 2009. It is also the kingdom’s answer to expensive fossil fuel imports and climate change.
These two massive energy projects, along with other solar developments in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, are demonstrating that the oil-rich region known in policy circles as MENA -- Middle East and North Africa -- is beginning to challenge long-standing assumptions about its energy resources.
While petroleum will remain the primary economic engine for MENA for decades to come, experts say renewable energy is gaining substantial new interest and investment from both government leaders and private-sector energy firms across the region and beyond.
In addition to the region’s oil kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and its five Gulf Cooperation Council partners (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and UAE), MENA comprises the five African nations of the Mediterranean (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt) and the Levant states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine.
Together, these regions claim a population of 321 million people, on par with the United States, and they cover a land area comparable to Europe. MENA also claims the world’s wealthiest nation, Qatar, as well as some of its most economically and politically challenged states, including Syria, Libya and Palestine.
In terms of renewable energy development, MENA has lagged behind much of the rest of the world, a condition experts attribute to the region’s historical reliance on oil and gas, but also its uneven economic growth and destabilization created by wars, regional crises, and long-standing religious and political tensions.
But that is beginning to change, especially in the more developed energy states of the Persian Gulf, as well as Egypt, Jordan and Morocco.
A ‘continuously expanding’ resource
Global consulting firm Ernst & Young, in its latest Cleantech Survey Report for MENA, ranked Saudi Arabia, UAE, Morocco and Jordan as having the greatest potential for renewable energy investment in the region, adding that “the opportunities to provide affordable and secure low-carbon energy are continuously expanding.”
And in a recent
blog post, General Electric executive Hani Majzoub, head of the GE power conversion sales for renewables across the MENA region, called 2014 “a breakthrough year for solar in the Middle East,” with 30 projects receiving contracts, including 12 new solar sites in Jordan alone.
“Accelerating the growth of solar is the continued development of innovative technologies and services that are further driving down the cost of solar systems, offering the rapidly growing regions of the Middle East and North Africa a valuable and economically viable energy alternative to conventional fossil fuels,” Majzoub said.
UAE, an exemplar of Middle East modernity with its gleaming twin cities, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, is also becoming the region’s clean energy hub. It has committed billions of dollars in new clean energy projects over the last four years, while also establishing a framework for outside parties to bring new ideas, technologies and investment into the region.
“The UAE, among all the oil-producing countries, has become the first mover,” Adnan Amin, director general of the International Renewable Energy Association, based in Abu Dhabi, said in a recent interview with
The National, an English-language newspaper based in UAE.
Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, managing director and chief executive of DEWA, drove home that idea last week: “We are determined to continue building and developing a greener economy ... to achieve a sustainable environment in terms of air quality, conserving water resources, more reliance on clean energy and implementing green development,” he said.
Al Tayer’s comment coincided with DEWA’s solicitation of bids for the largest build-out to date of the Al Maktoum Solar Park in Seih Al Dahal, at 800 MW. A 200 MW expansion, led by a Saudi contractor and using solar panels made by U.S.-based First Solar Inc., is already underway and set to be completed in 2017. The 800 MW phase III expansion is scheduled to produce first power in 2020, according to officials, pushing the park’s total generation to more than 1,000 MW.
UAE’s big buy into solar is partly driven by politics and partly by economics.
Leaders -- including Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, the president and ruler -- have championed solar power as an alternative to fossil fuels and a pathway toward reducing the country’s carbon footprint. But solar has also proved to be very competitive in terms of price. The 200 MW phase II of the Al Maktoum solar park, for example, will be built for a record-low cost of $0.0584 by ACWA Power of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Earlier this year, ACWA Power officials announced the company had secured $344 million in debt financing for the phase II expansion under loans from three Middle East banks, including Abu Dhabi-based First Gulf Bank. The loan is expected to cover 86 percent of the project’s cost, according to officials, and will offset roughly 470,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually.
Oil is removed from the electricity fuel mix
That doesn’t mean UAE is abandoning fossil fuels in favor of green energy. Under the Dubai Integrated Energy Strategy, officials have said DEWA will seek an electric power portfolio consisting of 71 percent natural-gas-fired turbines. Solar will rank as the second-largest electricity source, at 15 percent, followed by 7 percent each from coal and nuclear power.
But in UAE and across the region, one key energy fuel that is being removed, at least in large volumes, from the electricity mix is oil.
Stephen J. Auton-Smith, director at Ernst & Young and an adviser to several major energy projects in the MENA region, said in an interview that oil-rich states like Saudi Arabia face huge opportunity costs by burning oil for power generation. By harnessing the sun’s energy at utility scale, those countries can redirect oil and gas traditionally used for domestic energy consumption to other higher-value uses.
“When you have vast amounts of open land and an incredible solar resource like these countries do, the underlying structural driver is to conserve oil and gas for export and produce power from other alternative sources, even in the context of recent declines in commodity prices,” he said.
There is also the long-standing challenge of providing clean water to residents and businesses, a problem many water-stressed countries are addressing by building desalination and advanced wastewater recycling plants.
By scaling up solar, utilities in water-stressed countries run energy-intensive desalination and treatment facilities using solar energy rather than oil, resulting in lower opportunity costs and lower greenhouse gas emissions. A number of solar PV and CSP hybrid pilot projects are underway for this purpose, including in UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Auton-Smith said.
He also noted that electricity demand is rising in many MENA countries due to sustained population and economic growth. For countries lacking substantial fossil fuel resources, achieving greater energy independence means tapping a broader energy mix than MENA countries have traditionally relied on, he said.
Such conditions are playing out in Morocco, the MENA country farthest from the oil fields of the Middle East and most dependent on energy imports.
Morroco applies a ‘bold risk’ strategy
According to the World Bank, Morocco imports more than 91 percent of its energy resources from other countries, cutting a sizable hole in its national budget. Other experts estimate the country’s spending on crude oil, refined petroleum and coal at roughly $3 billion annually.
Recent lower oil prices have helped Morocco cut those costs and shrink its budget deficit from nearly 5 percent of gross domestic product in 2014 to 4.3 percent this year. But that hasn’t dissuaded the kingdom from shifting its long-term energy strategy away from fossil fuel imports in favor of domestically produced renewable energy.
As part of its 2009 National Energy Strategy, Morocco has pledged to bring online 6,000 MW of renewable energy -- 42 percent of its installed capacity -- from hydro, wind and solar resources by the end of the decade.
Last year, officials told the
Al-Hayat newspaper that the country would invest $11 billion in wind and solar over the next five years, allowing the country “to turn from an importer into an exporter of alternative energy by 2020.”
In addition to the Ouarzazate project, Morocco has identified four other sites for utility-scale solar developments: Ain Beni Mathar, Foum El Oued, Boujdour and Sebkhat Tah. Once built, the sites’ cumulative output should help Morocco avoid roughly 1 million tons of oil equivalent in imports annually and reduce emissions by 3.7 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, according to the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy.
The build-out will not be easy for Morocco, which ranks in the bottom half of the world’s countries in terms of GDP. To help move Morocco’s renewables agenda forward, international finance agencies such as the World Bank, African Development Bank Group and European Investment Bank have provided loans and credit assurances to the projects.
The International Energy Agency, in a detailed assessment of Morocco’s energy policy completed last year, said the country has implemented several key reforms to its energy markets, resulting in an 80 percent increase in electricity availablilty over the last 20 years. While the increase in electricity access has aided economic growth, it has also stretched the country’s generation capacity and required even more energy imports.
To help close the supply-and-demand gap, IEA recommended among other things that Morocco “optimise the deployment of solar power, maximising the use of concentrated solar power at peak hours and facilitating the use of photovoltaics.”
In its latest Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Index, published this month, Ernst & Young credited Morocco’s solar program for adhering to a “bold risk allocation strategy for such large-scale and complex projects.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-power-invades-oil-rich-middle-east/
UK firm to build €500m solar power farm in Iran
Image of a solar farm [Thomas R Machnitzki/Wikipedia]
September 21, 2017 at 12:45 pm
6
SHARES
A British investment firm plans to fund the building and implementation of one of the world’s largest solar power projects in Iran worth €500 million.
Iran’s Ministry of Energy signed the deal with the organisation Quercus for the 600 megawatt solar farm to be built over the next three years, making it the sixth largest solar project in the world.
Diego Biasi, the chief executive of Quercus, said the landmark deal represents a “huge opportunity” for investment in renewable energy and shows that Iran is “open for business”.
Iran has around 300 sunny days a year, which the solar power project would utilise to support Tehran’s goal of becoming a “major hub of solar energy serving the region and beyond,” said Hamid Baeidinejad, the Iranian ambassador to the UK.
The project – which is expected to reduce emissions by at least 260,000 tons per year – will put Britain at the forefront of Iran’s growing renewable energy industry and would strengthen ties between the two nations.
The deal is an effect of the Iranian nuclear deal struck in 2015, which guaranteed the lifting of international sanctions on Iran, after which the country aimed to create a prosperous business environment where countries and global companies would invest.
The negative attitude of US President Trump towards the nuclear deal, however, has worried potential investors, particularly after he told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday that it was the “worst and most one-sided transaction the United States has ever entered into”.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20170921-uk-firm-to-build-e500m-solar-power-farm-in-iran/
Although, even that has it's drawbacks as wind is generally temperamental and is a very inconsistent cycle, so production becomes very uneven. If they find ways to place them at higher altitudes where wind is much more consistent, they would also produce a more consistent rate. However, higher altitudes also means greater distances from developed areas so the transfer of that energy becomes difficult. But wind is certainly expanding very fast, but might not keep up with PV solar. Those parabolic mirrors in Morocco are amazing.
They do look good. Let's hope they are worth the money spent on them. With that kind of money ($9 billion) Morocco could have had a nuclear power plant.
