When the oil dries up there's still solar, says Algeria
15 08 07 - 14:51Send this article to a friend
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New York - Algeria looks to develop solar energy as an export resource, knowing that its reserves of oil and natural gas will one day dry up.
It was an idea being considered by Algerian planners for years but now work has begun on the construction of its first solar power plant at Hassi R'mel, 260 miles south of Algiers, the capital. The solar plant will be a hybrid, using both sun and natural gas to generate 150 megawatts. Of that, 25 megawatts will come from giant parabolic mirrors stretching over nearly 2 million square feet, which is roughly the size of 45 football fields.
The solar hybrid plant is the first of its kind and is expected to be online by 2010. In the future, Algeria hopes to generate enough solar power that it can export 6,000 megawatts to the European market by 2020, which would be equal to a tenth of current electricity consumption in Germany.
New York - Algeria looks to develop solar energy as an export resource, knowing that its reserves of oil and natural gas will one day dry up.
It was an idea being considered by Algerian planners for years but now work has begun on the construction of its first solar power plant at Hassi R'mel, 260 miles south of Algiers, the capital. The solar plant will be a hybrid, using both sun and natural gas to generate 150 megawatts. Of that, 25 megawatts will come from giant parabolic mirrors stretching over nearly 2 million square feet, which is roughly the size of 45 football fields.
The solar hybrid plant is the first of its kind and is expected to be online by 2010. In the future, Algeria hopes to generate enough solar power that it can export 6,000 megawatts to the European market by 2020, which would be equal to a tenth of current electricity consumption in Germany.
While the concept on a large scale is grand, critics are concerned that the huge number of mirrors will produce more heat which could reflect into the lower atmosphere and raise the global temperature, not unlike how cities with their massive amounts of concrete and asphalt absorb heat and return it to the atmosphere which raises the average temperature there. But Algerian representatives closer to the project say that's nonsense due to the location, which does not site directly by populated areas.
"Our potential in thermal solar power is four times the world's energy consumption so you can have all the ambitions you want with that," said Tewfik Hasni, managing director of New Energy Algeria, or NEAL, a company created by the Algerian government in 2002 to develop renewable energy.
Hasni says that it will take 10 years for it to become economically competitive, and while undersea cables to Sicily and Spain are planned for construction in 2010-2012, financing has not been worked out. But after the EU set lofty goals this year of producing 20% of its energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020, by the time the Alegerian solar project goes online, political difficulties could be set aside which would permit the next phase of construction to move forward - transmission to the European market.
Algeria's move to join the alternative energy camp is one other OPEC members have resisted, though they've all closely watched technology developments.
One of the supporters of Algeria's hybrid solar project is French President Nicolas Sarkozy who has said that it would "bind France and Algeria" in creating his vision of a "Mediteranian Union", giving rise to France's possible financing of the underseas transmission cable.
While OPEC nations have tried to curb talk of altnerative energy, with global concerns over limited oil supplies and the growing threat of global warming from fossil fuels, many OPEC members are now becoming more open to the idea.
Eduardo Zarza Moya, who works on solar power for Spain's public energy research center, CIEMAT, said at a June solar conference in Algeria, "The solar potential of Algeria is huge, enormous, because solar radiation is high and there is plenty of land for solar plants."
Also attending the conference was Wolfgang Palz, chairman of the independent World Council for Renewable Energy, who said that this was a big chance for OPEC member countries to "really do something instead of torpedoing alternative energy development."
The Hassi R'Mel plant is one of four planned for construction. Its use of abundent natural gas supplies are intended to suplement times of overcast skies, which could reduce solar power generation levels and for use at night when the sun
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