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 !
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 !
Last month the founder of Microsoft gave a speech on low carbon energy and climate change at TED, a renowned event on Technology, Entertainment and Design.
To Mr. Gates we need five means : carbon capture and storage, nuclear power and renewable energies (solar PV, Concentrated Solar Thermal and Wind power). I agree with that.
To him, we need 20 years to research on the needed breakthroughs to achieve zero emissions energy sources and twenty other years to apply them. I beg to differ on this. Continue »
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 »
The fact has been known for years: harvesting the energy provided by the sun to a tiny fraction of the Earth could supply all the energy Humankind needs without greenhouse gases emissions or pollution due to operation.
This week many blogs and websites published articles on Desertec, a foundation that would like to install many concentrated solar thermal plants in the Sahara desert to provide a fraction of the electricity Europe needs.
But many problems will have to be solved : funding the project, transmitting the electricity through the desert and the Mediterranean sea and so on. Continue »
I was writing in a comment that solar thermal could and even should provide electricity to the nations of the Middle East and how it would much better than nuclear. It seems I was quite right.
Published by an environmental NGO and various official bodies specialized in solar energy, a study notes that concentrated solar power (CSP) in deserts could bring a quarter of the global electricity by mid-century.
To date, CSP provides a mere 430 MW worldwide but things could change fast as this energy offers multiple advantages such as virtually zero greenhouse gases emissions. 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 »
