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Saudi Arabia reveals plans to be powered entirely by renewable energy.

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Saudi Arabia reveals plans to be powered entirely by renewable energy



Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil producer, has plans to become 100% powered by renewable and low-carbon forms of energy, according to an influential member of the royal family.

But the process is likely to take decades, and some observers are sceptical as to whether it is any more than window-dressing.

Prince Turki Al Faisal Al Saud, founder of the King Faisal Foundation and one of the state's top spokesmen, told the Global Economic Symposium in Brazil that he hoped the kingdom might be powered entirely by low-carbon energy within his lifetime – he is 67 – but that he thought it was likely to take longer.

However, he insisted Saudi was moving ahead with investment in renewable energy, nuclear power and other alternatives to fossil fuels and that it could use its vast oil reserves for other goods, such as plastics and polymers.

"Oil is more precious for us underground than as a fuel source," he said. "If we can get to the point where we can replace fossil fuels and use oil to produce other products that are useful, that would be very good for the world. I wish that may be in my lifetime, but I don't think it will be."

Joss Garman, political director of Greenpeace, said: "It speaks volumes that a Saudi prince can see the benefits of switching to clean energy sources when [UK chancellor] George Osborne seemingly cannot, but Saudi Arabia will only truly be a green economy when it leaves its fossil fuels in the ground."

Saudi Arabia's energy use is almost entirely from fossil fuels at present, with about two-thirds coming from oil and the remainder from gas. The state produces close to 12m barrels of oil a day, representing more than 12% of world crude production, and has about one-fifth of the world's oil reserves, according to the US government's Energy Information Administration. Energy use per person within the kingdom is also high by world standards, because energy prices are kept so low.

As Prince Turki noted, however, the kingdom has vast potential for using solar power. "The cost of solar energy is now 15% of what it was 20 years ago," he noted. Saudi Arabia has also signed memoranda of understanding – though no final deal as yet – with Argentina over nuclear energy.

But despite his commitment to advancing renewable energy in the Middle East, Prince Turki – who served as director of Saudi Arabia's intelligence services for more than 20 years and has also been an ambassador to the UK and the US – was also clear that the rest of the world was likely to continue to rely on fossil fuels for many years to come. "No country can ban itself from any one form of energy," he said.

One of the other potentially important technologies for Saudi Arabia is carbon capture and storage, as depleted oil fields could be used as storage for compressed carbon dioxide, but it has so far made little progress. The prince said the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology should be seen as an international effort rather than the responsibility of single countries.

Nebjsa Nakicenovic, deputy chief of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, said CCS was likely to be a vital technology around the world. Though he acknowledged there could be problems, as the technology is still unproven, he warned: "Do not discount CCS."

On renewables, Nakicenovic said the world should aim to generate 30% of energy from sustainable renewable sources by 2030. That would represent more than a doubling of current renewable energy usage, because although on paper about 15% of energy now comes from renewable sources, this includes a large amount of biomass – mostly wood, dung and other waste – burned in developing countries. Much of this is unsustainable, and requires a significant use of resources in foraging for firewood. "So [the target] is very ambitious, but doable," he said.



Saudi Arabia reveals plans to be powered entirely by renewable energy
 
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Solar thermal has great potential in Saudi Arabia and North African countries that are close to Sahara desert.


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Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) is the largest solar energy generating facility in the world. It consists of nine solar power plants in California's Mojave Desert, where insolation is among the best available in the United States. SEGS I–II (44 MW) are located at Daggett, SEGS III–VII (150 MW) are installed at Kramer Junction, and SEGS VIII–IX (160 MW) are placed at Harper Lake. NextEra Energy Resources operates and partially owns the plants located at Kramer Junction and Harper Lake.

The plants have a 354 MW installed capacity, making it the largest installation of solar plants of any kind in the world. The average gross solar output for all nine plants at SEGS is around 75 MWe — a capacity factor of 21%. In addition, the turbines can be utilized at night by burning natural gas.

NextEra claims that the solar plants power 232,500 homes and displace 3,800 tons of pollution per year that would have been produced if the electricity had been provided by fossil fuels, such as oil.

The facilities have a total of 936,384 mirrors and cover more than 1,600 acres (6.5 km2). Lined up, the parabolic mirrors would extend over 229 miles (370 km).


I support research on following projects:

1. Solar Thermal power station
2. Undersea cable grid to sell power to other countries
3. Liquid Hydrogen to store solar energy
4. Saline water agriculture to reclaim desert land and turn them into greenery

International Center for Biosaline Agriculture
Saline agriculture may be the future of farming
Biosalinity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Seawater Foundation
TS_Prototype_Creation
CGIAR
 
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Know this fact and know it well. Keep an eye out on Saudi Arabia. This country will rise so high and so fast and this is just the beginning. Soon people will point at KSA as a model of science and technology Instead of Israel or south Korea or at least as their equals.

How poetic, the country which was the most targeted and laughed at and propagandad against to have come all this way.

I read today in Arabic about our non-oil industry. Did you know that 40% of all Arab non-oil industry comes from Saudi Arabia? Did you know that the most Industrially advanced country in the Arab world is KSA? I bet none of you did. I am waiting for an English version of the article if it didn't come I will translate it soon.
 
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I can see KSA become world power in 10 years anyway , its a regional supowerpower now and with cash huge reserves and clever projects . Together we will be running middle east
 
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Aramco is already taking steps to reduce diesel fuel consumption and use natural gas.

KAEC is going to be the greenest city as per the rumors I have heard.

Solarpanel plant is coming soon in KSA with co-op of Hyndai Engineering.

Nothing is impossible if planned right.
 
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Solar power - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Solar areas defined by the dark disks could provide more than the world's total primary energy demand (assuming a conversion efficiency of 8%). That is, all energy currently consumed, including heat, electricity, fossil fuels, etc., would be produced in the form of electricity by solar cells. The colors in the map show the local solar irradiance averaged over three years from 1991 to 1993 (24 hours a day) taking into account the cloud coverage available from weather satellites.

Average insolation showing land area (small black dots) required to replace the world primary energy supply with solar electricity. 18 TW is 568 Exajoule (EJ) per year. Insolation for most people is from 150 to 300 W/m2 or 3.5 to 7.0 kWh/(m2day).
 
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Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore’s law apply to solar cells? | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore’s law apply to solar cells?
By Ramez Naam | March 16, 2011

The sun strikes every square meter of our planet with more than 1,360 watts of power. Half of that energy is absorbed by the atmosphere or reflected back into space. 700 watts of power, on average, reaches Earth’s surface. Summed across the half of the Earth that the sun is shining on, that is 89 petawatts of power. By comparison, all of human civilization uses around 15 terrawatts of power, or one six-thousandth as much. In 14 and a half seconds, the sun provides as much energy to Earth as humanity uses in a day.

The numbers are staggering and surprising. In 88 minutes, the sun provides 470 exajoules of energy, as much energy as humanity consumes in a year. In 112 hours – less than five days – it provides 36 zettajoules of energy – as much energy as is contained in all proven reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas on this planet.

If humanity could capture one tenth of one percent of the solar energy striking the earth – one part in one thousand – we would have access to six times as much energy as we consume in all forms today, with almost no greenhouse gas emissions. At the current rate of energy consumption increase – about 1 percent per year – we will not be using that much energy for another 180 years.

It’s small wonder, then, that scientists and entrepreneurs alike are investing in solar energy technologies to capture some of the abundant power around us. Yet solar power is still a miniscule fraction of all power generation capacity on the planet. There is at most 30 gigawatts of solar generating capacity deployed today, or about 0.2 percent of all energy production. Up until now, while solar energy has been abundant, the systems to capture it have been expensive and inefficient.

That is changing. Over the last 30 years, researchers have watched as the price of capturing solar energy has dropped exponentially. There’s now frequent talk of a "Moore’s law" in solar energy. In computing, Moore’s law dictates that the number of components that can be placed on a chip doubles every 18 months. More practically speaking, the amount of computing power you can buy for a dollar has roughly doubled every 18 months, for decades. That’s the reason that the phone in your pocket has thousands of times as much memory and ten times as much processing power as a famed Cray 1 supercomputer, while weighing ounces compared to the Cray’s 10,000 lb bulk, fitting in your pocket rather than a large room, and costing tens or hundreds of dollars rather than tens of millions.

If similar dynamics worked in solar power technology, then we would eventually have the solar equivalent of an iPhone – incredibly cheap, mass distributed energy technology that was many times more effective than the giant and centralized technologies it was born from.

So is there such a phenomenon? The National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy has watched solar photovoltaic price trends since 1980. They’ve seen the price per Watt of solar modules (not counting installation) drop from $22 dollars in 1980 down to under $3 today.

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Is this really an exponential curve? And is it continuing to drop at the same rate, or is it leveling off in recent years? To know if a process is exponential, we plot it on a log scale.

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And indeed, it follows a nearly straight line on a log scale. Some years the price changes more than others. Averaged over 30 years, the trend is for an annual 7 percent reduction in the dollars per watt of solar photovoltaic cells. While in the earlier part of this decade prices flattened for a few years, the sharp decline in 2009 made up for that and put the price reduction back on track. Data from 2010 (not included above) shows at least a 30 percent further price reduction, putting solar prices ahead of this trend.

If we look at this another way, in terms of the amount of power we can get for $100, we see a continual rise on a log scale.

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What’s driving these changes? There are two factors. First, solar cell manufacturers are learning – much as computer chip manufacturers keep learning – how to reduce the cost to fabricate solar.

Second, the efficiency of solar cells – the fraction of the sun’s energy that strikes them that they capture – is continually improving. In the lab, researchers have achieved solar efficiencies of as high as 41 percent, an unheard of efficiency 30 years ago. Inexpensive thin-film methods have achieved laboratory efficiencies as high as 20 percent, still twice as high as most of the solar systems in deployment today.

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What do these trends mean for the future? If the 7 percent decline in costs continues (and 2010 and 2011 both look likely to beat that number), then in 20 years the cost per watt of PV cells will be just over 50 cents.

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Indications are that the projections above are actually too conservative. First Solar corporation has announced internal production costs (though not consumer prices) of 75 cents per watt, and expects to hit 50 cents per watt in production cost in 2016. If they hit their estimates, they’ll be beating the trend above by a considerable margin.

What does the continual reduction in solar price per watt mean for electricity prices and carbon emissions? Historically, the cost of PV modules (what we’ve been using above) is about half the total installed cost of systems. The rest of the cost is installation. Fortunately, installation costs have also dropped at a similar pace to module costs. If we look at the price of electricity from solar systems in the U.S. and scale it for reductions in module cost, we get this:

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The cost of solar, in the average location in the U.S., will cross the current average retail electricity price of 12 cents per kilowatt hour in around 2020, or 9 years from now. In fact, given that retail electricity prices are currently rising by a few percent per year, prices will probably cross earlier, around 2018 for the country as a whole, and as early as 2015 for the sunniest parts of America.

10 years later, in 2030, solar electricity is likely to cost half what coal electricity does today. Solar capacity is being built out at an exponential pace already. When the prices become so much more favorable than those of alternate energy sources, that pace will only accelerate.

We should always be careful of extrapolating trends out, of course. Natural processes have limits. Phenomena that look exponential eventually level off or become linear at a certain point. Yet physicists and engineers in the solar world are optimistic about their roadmaps for the coming decade. The cheapest solar modules, not yet on the market, have manufacturing costs under $1 per watt, making them contenders – when they reach the market – for breaking the 12 cents per Kwh mark.

The exponential trend in solar watts per dollar has been going on for at least 31 years now. If it continues for another 8-10, which looks extremely likely, we’ll have a power source which is as cheap as coal for electricity, with virtually no carbon emissions. If it continues for 20 years, which is also well within the realm of scientific and technical possibility, then we’ll have a green power source which is half the price of coal for electricity.

That’s good news for the world.

Sources and Further Reading:

Key World Energy Statistics 2010, International Energy Agency,

Tracking the Sun III: The Installed Cost of Photovoltaics in the U.S. from 1998-2009, Barbose, G., N. Darghouth, R. Wiser., LBNL-4121E, December 2010,

2008 Solar Technologies Market Report: January 2010, (2010). 131 pp. NREL Report TP-6A2-46025; DOE/GO-102010-2867,

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About the Author: Ramez Naam is a computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is the author of More Than Human (Broadway Books, 2005), which the LA Times called "a terrific survey of current work and future possibilities in gene therapy, neurotechnology, and other fields." For More Than Human, Naam was awarded the 2005 H. G. Wells Award for Contributions to Transhumanism. Naam is a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and blogs at Unbridled Speculation. He lives in Seattle, where he is currently working on his next book The Infinite Resource: Human Innovation and Overcoming the Challenges of a Finite Planet. You can see Naam speak at a special event at the World Future Society 2011 conference in Vancouver, B.C.

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
 
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Los Angeles and California state is leading the US effort for moving towards solar:
SolarIndustryMag.com: LADWP Solar Program To Reach 100 MW
I have relatives who are involved with above project.

After the above article by Ramez came out, it created a wave of similar articles:

Ray Kurzweil: Solar Will Power the World in 16 Years | Think Tank | Big Think
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/opinion/krugman-here-comes-solar-energy.html?_r=
Mainstream Media Discovers Solar Power and Moore’s Law : Greentech Media
 
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