The University of Madaba’s geothermal system, the largest in the Middle East
Khaled Al-Sabawi, founder and president of Palestinian green energy pioneers MENA Geothermal, was one of the speakers at this spring’s much-publicised TEDx Ramallah conference. In an engaging and humorous speech, Al-Sabawi detailed the many benefits that geothermal energy has to offer his native land, from lower energy bills and carbon emissions to the prospect of a more independent and self-sufficient energy sector. The speech was reported widely, including by Al-Jazeera English.
As of this week, Al-Sabawi’s talk is now also available online, uploaded to the YouTube channel for TEDx Ramallah, for all to see. In just a few days, the video has attracted almost 10,000 viewers and can be viewed online. See below.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fD2bMavK8Y&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
As Green Prophet has reported in the past, MENA Geothermal has completed green energy systems for houses, apartment blocks and office buildings in the West Bank, and was awarded the contract to fit a 1.6MW system at the University of Madaba in Jordan, the Middle East’s largest geothermal installation. One of the driving forces behind MENA Geothermal’s success, says Khaled Al-Sabawi, is a patented improvement to standard geothermal systems which uses limestone dust, a waste product of Palestine’s quarrying and stone-cutting industry, to increase the efficiency and lower the cost of the company’s installations.
As well as MENA Geothermal’s success in winning large scale energy-saving contracts, Khaled Al-Sabawi’s dynamism and commitment have attracted major accolades from the business and green energy sectors. In 2010, Al-Sabawi was named one of the world’s top energy entrepreneurs by the Global Post. And in 2008, his company won the Energy Globe Award, one of the world’s most prestigious environmental prizes, for the geothermal heat and cooling system it fitted at the UCI Headquarters Building, located in Ramallah, Palestine. The UCI building was, until MENA fitted the University of Madaba system, the largest geothermal installation in the region.
Read more about green energy in Palestine on Green Prophet:
INTERVIEW: The Man Behind Palestine’s Green City Rawabi – Bashar Masri
Comet-ME Continues to Bring Power to Villagers in the South Hebron Hills
Jericho’s Agra-Industrial Park Goes Live With Solar Power
Author: Sarah Irving
Sarah Irving has spent much of the last decade writing about environmental and social issues, travel, and the Middle East, as a staffer at Ethical Consumer magazine and more recently as a freelancer. Her work has appeared in New Internationalist, Guardian Online, The Big Issue and many other publications, and she is a correspondent for Electronic Intifada. Her first book, Gaza: Beneath the Bombs, was published by Pluto Press in 2010 and her new version of the Bradt travel guide to Palestine will be out in late 2011. She can be reached at [email protected]
I do support the idea though.
I’ll tell you why I think this presentation is odious: an Israeli company is one of the world’s biggest geothermal companies – Ormat. The publicly traded company also has business in the Muslim world in Indonesia. This CEO plays a “charming” job of laughing at Israelis, like they are some hucksters and defense mongerers, giving absolutely no credit or credence to the people or place that has turned geothermal into a clean tech industry.
A huge thumb down.