Welcome ! As a young French Marketing professional with a Master's in International Management I have been selecting since January 2007 the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change, cleantech and the world energy sector. Sounds great ? Don't hesitate to subscribe now !
Remember the Desertec project and how I was convinced ? Their goal is to build solar, wind and other renewable energies facilities to power North Africa, the Middle East and part of Europe.
Well, I am not the only one as their first plant will start construction next year. With a capacity of 500 MW it will cost 2.8 billion USD, or 2 billion euros. The first phase will bring 150 MW and will take two to four years to build.
500 megawatts don’t seem much really compared to the hundreds of gigawatts that are planned and needed, but you have to start somewhere. (via Ecogeek)
The main problem with renewables today is scale. Even if they are growing faster and faster, we very rarely see projects that will bring more than a few hundred megawatts to the grids. But it is changing.
Indeed, to CleanTechies, South Africa will soon build a five gigawatt park where technologies in photovoltaic and concentrated solar power will be tested. We are talking about 21.3 billion dollars investment. (15 billion euros)
For more, please refer to the article published by the Agence France Pressed (AFP) today. It brings further details on what might be the world’s largest solar plant.
Good news everyone ! (*) You – as well as many and many other people – will now be able to read my humble articles about solar energies on the Solar Feeds News Network.
The world’s largest solar news network, it will enable me to reach over 59,000 Twitter followers and over 1,400 Facebook fans. The amount of subscribers is also much larger than mine.
Many thanks to Scott Weitzman the president and editor of this awesome website for featuring my work. Continue »
According to Enerzine [Fr] and other sources the Desertec Project is getting international support as several companies from Europe, America and Africa are joining the Desertec Industrial Initiative (Dii).
The US company First Solar was the first to join in and five more companies from Morocco, Tunisia, France, Spain and Italy followed suit. Desertec is due to bring 15 percent of Europe’s energy by 2050.
For a closer look at this most interesting project, please refer to my first post on this topic. Be sure that I will keep you updated on Desertec, so stay tuned !
The World Bank via its Clean Technology Fund is investing $750 million (522 million euros) in eleven concentrating solar plants in the Middle East and North Africa region. This is due to spur additional investments worth $4.85 billion.
These projects are due to add nearly a gigawatt of capacity to local grids within three to five years in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia and would triple the current concentrated solar power (CSP) capacity.
I wonder if this could be a significant boost to the DESERTEC project as it is exactly about building renewable energy facilities in these countries. Continue »
One of the main hindrances of solar energy is that when there is no more sun, there is no more electricity as well. This problem is being solved with the molten salt technology which stores energy for seven hours.
A Californian company is willing to build a 150 Megawatt plant – The Rice Solar Energy Project – using this technology in the Sonoran Desert near Palm Springs. A similar project with 280 MW of capacity could soon be built in Arizona.
Answering the main issue faced by solar, molten salt and similar technologies will play an important role if solar is due to answer a quarter of our global electricity needs.
Concentrating Solar Thermal is a fantastic energy source and some experts estimate that it could answer a quarter of the global electricity needs by 2050 if large plants were installed in sunny deserts.
However the New York Times notes that this energy source use significant amounts of water. Since this resource is already scarce in these areas this energy source already triggers tensions.
This is a further example of how no energy source is perfect and that energy efficiency and conservation are absolutely vital to our civilization. Continue »
Solar PV seems to be everywhere in the environmental news as many companies around the world are working in this segment. Meanwhile, little is written on the amazing potential of solar thermal. This may change soon.
A US company specialized in solar thermal claims that Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) could bring 90 percent of the country’s electricity just by using the equivalent of 10 percent of the Nevada desert.
Even if this sounds too big to be true – as with the Pickens plan - if only a fifth was actually carried out, it would change for ever the way we look at renewables. Continue »
