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)
Will fighting climate change become the ultimate fight ? If the Palestinian Authority and Israel can sit at the same table to fight climate change I guess we can save ourselves from warming temperatures. To the AFP:
” Some 15 Mediterranean countries, including Israel and the Palestinian Authority, agreed Friday to work together to combat the effects of climate change that threaten the region. “
Participants are willing to fight desertification and improve energy and water access. The full article is a wealth of information, so be sure to read it.
Living now in Paris I am able to go easily to conferences. Yesterday I was attending to a conference given by Mr.Paul van Son and Dr. Oliver Steinmetz, the CEO of Desertec Industries and member of the supervisory board, respectively.
Their enthusiasm and visionary ambitions are highly communicative. I now compare the Desertec project to the Apollo program which sent men on the moon in less than a decade. Many thought it couldn’t be done at the time.
David JC MacKay in his brilliant book Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air stated that Europe won’t be able to rely completely on local renewables. Continue »
To the AFP : ” Egypt announced on Wednesday it would build its planned nuclear powerplant on the Mediterranean coast of el-Dabaa which it hopes will start production in 2019, the state news agency MENA reported. “
” Egypt has already used several foreign companies as consultants, including Areva and Westinghouse Electric Co. (this) plant would be followed by three other reactors, tentatively scheduled to start production in 2025. “
This would be the fourth country in the region to build nuclear reactors. Meanwhile, the country is also willing to develop renewable energies such as wind and solar. Continue »
I once wrote that China planted a great green wall to stop desertification. It seems some African nations are willing to follow this example in order to stop the Sahara from going South.
Indeed to the BBC : “The Great Green Wall project is backed by the African Union and is aimed at halting the advancing Sahara Desert. The belt would be 15km (nine miles) wide and 7,775km (4,831 miles) long.“
The dozen nations involved in this most ambitious project are lacking the necessary funds, and are calling rich nations for help. Continue »
It is no news for you if you subscribed to this website : solar thermal alone could provide up to a quarter of global electricity by 2050. The use of molten salt could enable our civilization to store solar electricity for up to seven hours.
Morocco is ideally located to harvest all this energy as the average sunshine there is over 3,000 hours per year ( over 8 hours a day ). The Kingdom will build for $9 billion (6.6 billion euros) up to 2 GW of capacity.
This will be brought by five different plants of both solar photovoltaic and thermal and will answer up to 42 percent of the national need by 2020. 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 »
We have seen it previously, the Amazon Rainforest could become a desert because of deforestation and climate change. As I noted in May a three degrees Celsius increase would destroy it by up to 75 percent.
But could global warming help the Sahara region becoming green again ? To National Geographic it could be the case as rainfall increases in neighboring regions like the Sahel.
Of course this greening won’t be occuring as fast as the Amazon and other rainforest destructions, but still it is one of these rare good news about climate change.
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 »
