ACWA rumored to win the contract to build a 160 MW CSP project in in the south of Morocco.

“We are going to opt for the offer made by the consortium of ACWA,” a source close to Morocco’s solar energy agency MASEN told Reuters. The source asked not to be named pending an official announcement due later this week.

ACWA Power International also investing in wind energy in the Middle East is the Saudi-based developer, owner and operator of utility-scale water and power projects. Traditionally, the power had been produced by fossil fuels, for example for the oil-powered water desalination that Saudi Arabia is dependent on.

But in a turnaround on fossil energy for the Saudi company, ACWA has become a world leader in bids for CSP projects. Since CSP is a form of solar power that uses the same “back end” – a thermal power plant –  as a coal or gas or oil plant does to make electricity from turbines driven by steam, the expertise a fossil energy company brings is adaptable to this form of renewable energy.  The solar field itself that removes the need to burn fossil energy to make heat, accounts for about half the scope of the project, and can be developed by solar partners.

For this $500 million project ACWA has teamed up with the Spanish engineering firm Aries Ingenieria Y Sistemas and TSK Electronica y Electricidad for the design, finance, construction, operation and maintenance.

The news follows the success last month of the ACWA bid to build the Bokpoort CSP project 600 km west of Johannesburg, South Africa in its selection as a preferred bidder.

Related: Saudi Arabian Solar Chosen by South Africa

ACWA says that it plans to make solar development part of its portfolio, to reach 5 percent, over the next two years. Saudi Arabia itself now plans an extraordinary amount of solar power, with $109 billion slated for the development of enough solar power to power a third of its domestic consumption of electricity, which is growing so fast that it threatens to take down its ability to export oil. The Kingdom says it wants to grow this solar economy domestically, and has taken steps to begin that, with the first ever poly-silicon refining.

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Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the Masdar CEO, is the recipient of this year’s United Nations’ Champions of the Earth award.

The award honours individuals whose actions and leadership have had a far-reaching positive impact on the environment, in advancing clean energy technologies to mitigate the threats of climate change.

Abu Dhabi’s multi-faceted renewable energy company, Masdar, has created the first-ever clean-energy-powered eco-city in the kind of  oil-rich environment much more conducive to discounting climate change.

But Masdar’s night solar tower project in Spain – Gemasolar, is a true “tipping point” investment in a clean energy future. The company spearheads the changes we must make for civilization to survive.

Gemasolar, funded by Masdar and developed by Torresol, is the first of the utility-scale solar power plants of the future, able to ship power on demand to supply whatever peak a region has.

(Related: Masdar Opens First Baseload Solar Plant in Spain: Gemasolar)

The only other project that uses this technology; SolarReserve’s Tonopah plant being built near Las Vegas has been contracted to begin shipping its solar power at noon and stopping at midnight, for example. This type of solar is real solar on demand; day or night.

Despite the huge advantage of such a flexible energy supply from solar, CSP plants like these are at the top of the cost curve at a time when PV prices are plunging. Thermal solar or concentrated solar power (CSP) works the same way as traditional thermal power plants, but uses the clean energy of the sun’s heat as  the fuel.

Most funding would go to the easy solar, PV, with its rock bottom prices – after a decade of furious competition.

But in Gemasolar, Masdar pioneered the commercial scale development of a technology that uses molten salt as both the transfer fluid and the storage medium for energy within a tower (for the maximum gravity-assisted energy efficiency) at a time when CSP technologies are only just beginning to be built in enough numbers to begin to benefit from the efficiencies of mass production.

So it is an important investment that should begin to do for CSP technology what Chinese manufacturing smarts has done for solar PV.

Dr Al Jabar also serves as a member of the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Sustainable Energy for All, which aims to double the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix by 2030, achieving universal energy access, and is also a member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Group on Energy and Climate Change (AGECC).

Like “the Green Shiekh” Dr Al Jabar was strongly influenced by Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan. The award is deserved. Perhaps the extreme vulnerability of the desert region has influenced this far-sighted vision of the clean energy future we must develop.

“The energy solutions the world needs today cannot be driven by one country alone”, says Dr Al Jaber. “They will be stimulated by collaboration, and founded on public-private partnerships. As a global community, we have the responsibility to act collectively and address the challenges we face, particularly ensuring that future generations enjoy energy and water resources in a sustainable manner.”

Image by Charo Sevilla for Torresol 

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A Saudi solar project with gigantic storage could deliver solar at night in South Africa.

Saudi Arabia might not spring to mind as a nation creating the top CSP companies globally, but South Africa just selected as a “preferred bidder” to develop solar, a consortium led by the Kingdom’s own power and water group ACWA Power International.

South Africa’s new renewable energy policy is one of the most professionally discriminating in the world, according to SolarReserve SVP Tom Georgis. The nation’s first request for bids to meet its new renewable target was limited to just the top global solar PV and CSP companies able to muster the technical and financial resources to meet the contracts professionally.

This avoids the site “squatting” that wasted resources in California, where fly by night developers bought or rented key tracts of land with solar potential in the southwestern desert, despite having no possible way to produce energy – yet each proposal still had to get fully vetted to determine that anyway.

First solar project for ACWA.

While the Saudi firm has 12 GW of traditional power generation capacity in the MENA region, and it plans to ramp up its total capacity to 30 GW by the end of 2014, this would be its first solar project, but the consortium it leads includes Spain’s CSP giant Acciona, as well as Sener which partnered with Masdar on the first 24-hour solar CSP project globally.

The ACWA-led group’s bid for the 160 MW CSP project in Morocco, Ouarzzate, like the proposal for South Africa, builds on the company’s experience with thermal energy production, because CSP also uses steam-driven turbines in the plant to deliver power, only the heat source is different: the sun.

Huge potential for solar.

With plans for solar to make up 5 percent of its portfolio, ACWA plans to develop 1.5 GW of solar within two years, mostly in CSP projects. It certainly will have no shortage of opportunity to do so.

Saudi Arabia’s complete turnaround on renewable energy; which calls for spending $109 billion on new renewable energy to solar-power a third of the Kingdom, is designed to favor local production.

(Related: Saudis to Make Desert Sands into Solar Polysilicon)

The consortium’s bid was one of 19 preferred bids during the second-window evaluation under the South African government’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Programme (REIPPP), which opened March 5 and closed May 21, according to Engineering News.

If accepted, their group’s bid for the 50 MW Bokpoort CSP project in the Northern Cape would be ACWA’s first South African project and begin operation in 2015.

To meet the first target set by the nation’s new policy requiring 15 percent renewable energy by 2020, 1 GW of solar projects is being put out to bid this year. The renewable energy target is for a total of 10,000 GWh annually by 2013, to come from all renewables combined.

Largest ever energy storage capacity:

ACWA expects to be able to deliver power at 2.51 South African Rands per kilowatt hour. In U.S. dollars, that’s 30 cents a kilowatt hour. While this is expensive, the project will include the largest thermal storage capacity ever for a CSP plant of its size, enabling it to produce 200 GWh annually.

Energy storage is the trump card that CSP offers, supplying a twofer, not merely electricity, but also the energy storage that will become more essential to even out the grid as more renewable energy is added. While solar PV can power days, only CSP can store energy to power evenings, since the back end is a thermal power plant run off steam-powered turbines, and heat can be stored in molten salts for use later.

Image Night view of Cape Town, from Shutterstock

Related:
Why Did the Saudis Just Go Big in Solar? Oil Prices.
Interview: SolarReserve For the MENA Region?

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With the recent announcement of the most ambitious solar plan in the world, solar developers are now headed to the oil-rich Kingdom to help make it happen.The first of a planned 25 GW of CSP (Concentrated Solar Power: mirrors to heat liquids to drive turbines) and 16 GW of PV (PhotoVoltaic: direct electrical conversion, like on rooftops) to supply Saudi Arabia with a $109 billion plan to solar-power a third of the Kingdom have been put out to bid now. Some of the fine print details have now emerged from CSP Today. Once it is complete, 25 GW would be a third of the expected global CSP in 20 years, according to current plans. Bids will be initially for about 1,000 MW each for the first year.

These are utility-scale projects, and the smallest CSP project will be 5 MW. PV will be used to meet most daytime demand within the Kingdom. CSP will fill in because its energy can be stored for use later into the evening peak. Fossil energy for domestic use will be a last resort, or combined with CSP.

Saudis are investigating hybrid plants.

CSP can be piggybacked on to a fossil fueled traditional plant, since – though while one harvests the sun, the other burns oil – both use that heat to turn the same turbines to make electricity. The only difference is that CSP uses (free, limitless) sun to create that steam, while the traditional plant must burn up the Saudis’ (valuable, finite) supplies of oil.

If a typical parabolic trough CSP plant is incorporated into a fossil fuel plant, like at Kuraymat in Egypt, it makes very economic use of the “back end” (the thermal energy plant running turbines off steam) getting twice the bang for the buck. The solar field of collectors accounts for only half the cost of a parabolic trough CSP plant, although adding storage adds 16% to that.

And doubling production from the same back end means adding power the Kingdom needs, without raising carbon emissions.

All Saudi desalination will ultimately be solar-powered.

Saudi water desalination is a huge part of its domestic electricity use, and the Kingdom’s Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) plans to switch this entirely to solar operation. The SWCC operates the 30 publicly-owned desalination plants and a network of pumping stations, reservoirs and all the pipes to transport the water in bulk from the plants to the major consumption centers. Energy is used to desalinate, but it also takes a great deal of energy to move water through the entire Kingdom. The largest city, Riyadh, is very far from the coast.

As the first solar desalination project, next year, the Saudis will flip the switch on the world’s largest solar desalination project, producing 30,000 cubic metres of water per day for 100,000 residents of Al-Khafji near Kuwait.

Local production will be preferred.

The Saudis have emphasized that the new solar economy must create local jobs and develop local expertise. Taking control of the PV side of the $109 billion investment in solar, they have just invested in their first polysilicon refining plant, as the precursor to producing their own solar panels. Home-made CSP also will be important. How much of a CSP plant can be produced locally?

Local Saudi CSP company Acwa Power gave a hint. A surprising shortage of welding and galvanising facilities in the Kingdom means that the steel structure might be the hardest to localize, but once these are addressed, more than 80% of a parabolic trough type of CSP solar field can be local. Acwa president and CEO Paddy Padmanathan added that over the lifetime of a plant, operation & maintenance contributes 30% of the costs, which could potentially be up to 90% local.

Image BrightSource

 Read more on Saudi Solar:

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Saudis Could Export Solar for the Next Twenty Centuries

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Wonder just why Saudi Arabia finally got serious about solar with a $109 billion plan to solar-power a third of the Kingdom? I did. After all, for a long time, while its greener neighbors have been adding thousands of megawatts of clean climate-friendly power, the kingdom has ignored its solar potential. It has next to nothing installed, 50 MW.

What changed? Oil prices are high. With rapidly growing electricity demand, Saudi Arabia is the largest oil consumer in the Middle East.

The kingdom uses crude oil to keep the lights on, the A/C humming.

It also must turn its only water supply, seawater, into water that is drinkable or bathed in, and desalination takes a lot of electricity.

“At world market prices, solar is competitive if you use crude oil to generate electricity,” Maher al-Odan, a senior consultant at King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Research (KA-CARE) told Reuters

The Saudis have no coal or natural gas.

An average of 700,000 barrels a day of crude were used in Saudi power stations during the peak air-conditioning demand period from May to September last year.

KA-CARE, which was set up to plan Saudi Arabia’s new energy mix – and has moved aggressively to switch the kingdom to renewables – said the kingdom could be taking bids in the first quarter of next year for the first of these solar projects.

The first projects will have a combined capacity of 3 GW, about half each from PV (photovoltaic solar panels like on houses) and half from CSP (concentrated solar power) using a variety of solar thermal technologies that run like a traditional thermal plant in the back end but use sunlight in various ways to generate that steam, rather than burning fossil fuels.

PV might seem a counterintuitive choice for the region, where most of the major projects next door are in CSP solar thermal technologies, because PV can lose as much as 15 percent at the very high temperatures found in the region.

“We have losses due to high temperatures and so on,” Odan  in an interview, compared with European nations like world leader Germany.

“But what we gain from high radiation (from increased sunshine) more than compensates for the loss of efficiency.”

Saudi Arabia has invested in its own manufacture of polysilicon, which is refined from its equally abundant sand and is the raw material from which solar panels are made.

What has changed is that solar PV has become a better deal, purely economically.

Arab News reported that the $109 billion investment in renewable energy projects in Saudi Arabia will save some 690,000 barrels of oil every day if completed.

“PV is highly competitive now,” says Robin Mills, head of Manaar Energy Consulting,” against oil and against the higher cost gas the Saudis have available.”

Image of Arabian lady at home from Shutterstock

Read more on solar energy:
Interview: SolarReserve For the MENA Region?
Saudis Could Export Solar for the Next Twenty Centuries
Solar to Light Our Nights Gets Hotter

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After a very slow start in solar energy production, Israel is finally beginning to join her Arab neighbors fast-forwarding into a solar future, like the Saudis’ $109 Billion Solar Plan to Power a Third of Saudi Arabia.

Arava Power Company, Israel’s only solar developer to make any headway against the entrenched bureaucratic resistance, now has financing and power agreements for eight solar power projects totaling 58.5 MW, valued at (a comparatively high by U.S. standards) $204 million.

In March, the company was given the go ahead by the country’s Public Utility Authority (PUA) to install a 40 MW project, once it got funding from the Obama administration in February.

(Related: Arava’s 40 MW Solar to Power a Third of Touristy Eliat’s Peak Power.)

But the only project to be approved prior to that was (again, Arava’s) small 5 MW installation that we covered in Bedouin Solar Power Activate! Even that tiny project faced months of bureaucratic battles.

Arava plans to ultimately build 400 MW of solar projects, which would quadruple Israel’s current solar capacity of 140 MW.

The reason for the sluggardly growth is its very unambitious clean energy legislation, which seems inexplicable in a land simply brimming with the sort of engineering genius in its “Silicon Wadi” that should have catapulted the country to Middle East dominance in clean energy.

(Related: Chamelic Invents Answer for Desert Solar & Dust! )

It was the Israeli engineers at Luz for example that virtually invented the entire solar thermal industry that has gone overseas. BrightSource Offers World’s Biggest Solar Storage Deal.

Despite all that talent, for example, Arava’s 58.5 MW solar project is to be built by Germany’s energy powerhouse Siemens. The financing is from French and Israeli banking interests, France’s Electricite de France, the Israeli branch of France’s EDF, the Israeli energy investment bank Noy Fund and financiers Migdal Insurance Company, its largest bank, Hapoalim, and Amitim, which funds diaspora projects.

The funding came once a provisional license from the Public Utilities Authority was granted and an agreement to buy the power was signed with the Israel Electric Company.

Although Israel has introduced a feed-in tariff, which includes  projects up to 5 MW, the rates offered are so low as to provide no incentive to solar developers. And it has introduced a 10 percent renewable target (by 2020), but there is really no policy mechanism to get there, and no punishment for failure to.

The right wing government that has dominated Israeli politics has retarded the growth of renewables energy in favor of chasing the vanishing mirage of fossil energy.

(Related: Has Israel Become a Petrostate?)
But natural gas is proving to be a volatile misstress. Electricity prices are set to jump 9 percent this year.

A few months ago,  the Public Utility Authority suddenly approved nine licenses in a month totaling 385 MW of utility scale PV, and another 50 small PV installations totaling 116 MW. With these, including the Arava licenses, now approved, things are starting to look up.

Read more on Israel solar:

Could Israel Join With its Arab Neighbors in Medgrid?
Egypt Now Contracting a Whopping 1,000 MW Wind Farm!
Solar Power to Pay off Greek Debt?

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Qatar is the latest of the oil-rich Middle East/North African (MENA) nations to make bold solar plans to trap a world-record insolation to supply energy for its rapidly growing economy – one that bolted an incredible 20 percent last year.

This week a senior official of Qatar Electricity and Water Company (QEWC) announced the replacement of over 10 percent of its conventional forms of energy used to produce electricity and water with solar power by 2018.

With an incredible daily supply of 16 hours of solar insolation, Qatar has the chance to build a solar-based electricity supply which is far more efficient than any other part of the world.

“Countries that have opted and developed solar energy have benefited a lot. Presently we are planning to replace 10 percent of total energy used for electricity generation and water desalination with solar power by 2018”, General Manager of QEWC Fahad Hamad Al Mohannadi told a news conference attended by the Federation of Arab News Agencies.

He added that the future is full of challenges as we will require more and more energy in the years to come; so with the passage of time as a result of scientific advancement and availability of cost effective technologies, solar power will provide a viable alternative source of energy.

QEWC is serious about local solar power production. It has just signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate with Qatar-based Qatar Solar Technologies (QSTec) to advance solar power in the region.

Last December QSTec was awarded the New Economy Magazine’s Clean Tech and New Energy Award for Best Joint Venture (Middle East/Africa). Its $1 billion polysilicon manufacturing plant, located in Ras Laffan Industrial City, will initially produce 8,000 metric tonnes of polysilicon in 2013.

Polysilicon is the raw material for solar panel production, and it is refined from sand in a complex high tech processing facility. The company acquired the advanced second generation technology for solar grade polysilicon production from Centrotherm Photovoltaics of Germany.

QSTec has signed a memorandum of understanding to assist QEWC in helping it meet the goal to supply 10 percent of the kingdom’s energy demand from solar, although it is not clear from the press release just how the two will make solar panels from the polysilicon, since neither are in the solar panel manufacturing business.

But German solar energy module manufacturer SolarWorld holds a one third stake in QSTec and no doubt expects to source polysilicon for its German solar module manufacturing from the deal.

But like Saudi Arabia, which recently startled the world with an unprecedented and extraordinarily ambitious solar goal, Qatar seems to hope to handle the production and manufacturing side of the goal at home. Saudi Arabia too has begun the refining of polysilicon from its abundant sands.

For both countries, polysilicon manufacturing is a brand new industry. The resolve with which these two sand-and-sun-rich middle eastern countries have embraced the new industry bodes very well for a clean energy future.

Read more on solar Middle East:

Interview: SolarReserve For the MENA Region?
Saudis Could Export Solar for the Next Twenty Centuries
Solar to Light Our Nights Gets Hotter

Image: douglas knight /Shutterstock

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Big Solar drives a wedge between the need to abate climate change and end poverty, says The World Development Movement.

Claiming the the World Bank’s Clean Technology Fund is supposed to be used to alleviate poverty, a British group is objecting to the use of World Bank funds in Morocco to deploy a Desertec solar project in Morocco that will export power to Europe.

The Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (MASEN) is expected to award the contract for the first phase of the 500 MW Ouarzazate solar project within weeks to one of three energy developers from outside Morocco.

MASEN intends to develop four 500 MW solar projects by 2020, which would allow it to source nearly half of its electricity from renewables, as well as become a net exporter of energy to Europe thanks to its interconnector stretching to Spain. In anticipation of becoming a renewables powerhouse, Morocco doubled the capacity of the interconnector to 400MW in 2007.

After accepting bids from 200 companies, Spain’s Abesinsa ICI  Abengoa’s industrial engineering and construction unit, Italy’s Enel SpA  and Saudi-owned ACWA Power International are in the lead to develop the project. While Abengoa has developed projects like this before, Enel has only 230 MW in solar development.

Major industrial giants like Siemens, Mitsubishi, Daewoo, Lockheed Martin and Sener were shut out.

The World Development Movement claims that using Clean Technology Fund money for the solar project would be a misuse of funds, as it claims that the program is intended partly to reduce poverty, and “to prioritise projects that tackle poverty and aid transition to a low carbon economy, instead of subsidising multinational companies.”

But the objective of the Clean Technology Fund is to invest in clean energy projects in developing nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions of the recipient country over the long term, according to WRI.

As solar projects go mainstream, they are increasingly developed by very large engineering firms. Saudi  Arabia has a $109 billion solar plan to power one third of its country, for example. This will not be developed by small companies.

According to the World Bank [PDF] the bids must support local manufacturers within a regulatory framework that requires investment locally, where bids must specify local content clauses, including technical education and R&D.

Morocco is ideally situated for hosting this giant solar project for the Desertec plan to power Europe from the Sahara, because it has the solar insolation, the strong government support and existing grid connections with ALgeria and Spain.

But another key reason that the World Bank selected Morocco for funding was the existence of a local manufacturing base with already existing industries, with the ability to supply the project from the most basic raw materials through to the final metal structures, electric and electronic equipment.

As the North African deserts becomes a hub for CSP solar power, driven by Desertec, it will increasingly develop and hone an expertise in solar project development that will add jobs as a thriving clean technology sector develops in the region.

It would be a pity if changing the emphasis to poverty reduction within the Clean Technology Fund program led to weakening its far more far-reaching good it can do in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by helping the developing world hurdle the pollutants that threaten us all, and most particularly, the poor, by developing a solar power industry supply chain in Morocco.

Related:
Morocco to Build Cars in Zero Carbon Factory
Interview: SolarReserve For the MENA Region?
Egypt to Test Unique CSP Solar/Biomass Hybrid Plant

Image of solar thermal from Abengoa

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A consortium of European governments, universities and research institutions are funding an innovative solar/biomass hybrid power plant test, coordinated by Italy’s national energy agency, ENEA. The EU is funding the pilot Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) project in Egypt with 11,755,049 Euros, through the EU Seventh Framework Programme.

The project will test units that can produce electricity from two renewable sources. The solar energy is to come from a concentrating solar power technology using molten salts as the heat transfer fluid, the same way that Masdar’s Gemasolar plant in Spain works, in the first 24-hour solar power plant in the world.

(Related: Masdar Opens First Baseload Solar in Spain – Gemasolar)

The CSP technology to be used in the pilot was developed and improved on by Italy’s ENEA; a solar thermal technology based on molten salts as the heat transfer fluid, able to deliver temperatures up to 550 ° C.

This uses mirrors to focus sunlight to heat up the molten salts, and these molten salts then both store and supply the heat needed to produce electricity in the same way that traditional thermal (coal, gas, or biomass) plants operate – on steam driven turbines.

Interestingly, this pilot project will also run on biomass at night, which is burned in the thermal power plant, making this a novel hybrid of two renewable forms of electricity.

(Related: Morocco to Pioneer 1 GW Hydro-Wind Hybrid Power)

While solar thermal CSP is particularly well suited to hybrid combos with the other thermal sources of energy in the back end, it has been only paired till now with fossil thermal energy sources to this point, piggybacked onto a coal plant, or – as at Kuraymat (photographed by our own Tafline Laylin) on a natural gas plant.

This one will be paired with steam supplied by burning waste biomass, biogas, or industrial residues, making this a renewable/renewable hybrid. This technology allows combined heat and power production from solar power that is integrated with other renewable fuels, such as biomass, biogas, industrial residues.

Towards the end of the four year project, an experimental demonstration plant will be built at the Campus of the City University of Science and Technology of Borg-el-Arab, near Alexandria, Egypt. This plant will co-generate 1 MW of electricity and 4 MW of thermal energy to power air conditioning equipment for buildings as well as a small desalination unit, that can supply 250 cubic meters of water per day .

The pilot project is small, and hopes to produce some results that would lead to it being utilized in small or medium size power plants which could be placed close to the need for the desalination, and electricity supply.

It is intended as a model to supply local power and heat needs, and one that is easily able to accept a back-up renewable energy fuel (the biomass, biogas, or waste) of whichever sort is locally abundant. By pairing the solar with the biomass, the expectation is that a 24 hour electricity supply can be produced.

Because the MENA region is a rich source of the solar radiation that is ideal for CSP, its success could lead to wide scale adoption in this region and others that are similarly underserved with electricity, while being “over-served” with the solar potential to supply it.

Egypt in particular, and many other countries in the MENA region have a demand for electricity that is growing at some of the fastest rates in the world. The region is to varying extents dependent on desalination for water supplies. McKinsey has predicted that by 2030 water consumption will increase by 40 percent.

Read more on Middle East solar power:
Middle Eastern Oil Companies Try Solar CSP to Boost Oil Production
Interview: SolarReserve For the MENA Region?
$109 Billion Solar Plan to Power a Third of Saudi Arabia

Above image by Christopher Kraemer

The post Egypt to Test Unique CSP Solar/Biomass Hybrid Plant appeared first on Green Prophet.

To put 41 GW in perspective, China is the world’s leader in wind power now, overtaking Germany and the U.S. with  about 48 GW of wind. This is a very serious move by a country well able to afford this kind of investment, that till recently has lagged the rest of the MENA region in renewables trailing Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates.

Traditional photovoltaic (PV) solar is to supply 16 GW, but the bulk of the solar (25 GW) is to come from the very desert-friendly concentrated solar power (CSP) that focuses the sun with mirrors to create the intense heat that drives turbines in a thermal power plant.

Citing government officials, Deutsche Bank said the capacity would be added in competitive bidding starting with 1,100 megawatts of PV and 900 megawatts of solar thermal in the first quarter of 2013. A second round of bidding is due in the second half of 2014.

Solar Reserve, which is constructing the largest 24 hour solar CSP project worldwide in Nevada has already been in talks with the Saudis.

Kevin Smith the CEO of Solar Reserve told GreenProphet that the company is among those looking to bid. The CSP company uses similar technology to the Gemasolar project built in Spain by Abu Dhabi’s visionary state-funded clean energy company Masdar. Because both use molten salt as both the transfer liquid and the storage medium, they can supply electricity long after dark.

“They really only – in the last couple of years – have started to really increase their solar activity” he said of Saudi solar ambitions. “We expect there will be projects going into construction in Saudi next year. Hopefully with us, but certainly, with someone. We expect that their program will kick off next year. We hope we get can projects in construction in 2013.”

The Saudis could potentially save 523,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day over the next 20 years by such a boost to renewable energy, according to Saudi officials.

“The difficulties the Saudis have is their economy is all oil based” Smith concurred. “Really they want to maximise their exports of oil, but really what they’re using a lot of their oil for power generation in the country. It’s fine if oil is $20 a barrel, but now that they can sell it for $100 plus a barrel, it’s not a very cost-effective use of their oil.”

Nuclear, wind and geothermal would together contribute just half that amount at a still staggering 21,000 megawatts (21 GW) as we covered here: Solar-Rich Saudis Running after Nukes. But the new solar plans dwarf these. As they should.

“We are not only looking for building solar plants,” al- Odan said in an interview in Riyadh yesterday. “We want to run a sustainable solar energy sector that will become a driver for the domestic energy for years to come.”

The Saudis may require bid winners to supply from factories built in the nation, according to Vishal Shah, an analyst at Deutsche Bank AG in New York, as we have covered previously: Saudis to Make Desert Sands into Solar Polysilicon.

About $82 billion will go to capital costs, with the remainder of the $109 billion going to train the Saudis to run the solar plants as well as for maintenance and operation, al-Odan told Bloomberg.

Once the strategy, which includes new regulations and financial incentives for private investors, is approved “we will start implementation directly,” al-Odan said.

Saudi Arabia may burn 850 million barrels of oil a year, or 30 percent of its crude output, to generate electricity by 2030 if doesn’t become efficient in energy consumption, Electricity & Co-Generation Regulatory Authority Governor Abdullah Al-Shehri said in a presentation in Riyadh May 8.

Its plans are likely to be approved later this year, al-Suliman said, according to a copy of the presentation he gave on May 8.

“The Saudi Arabian government has a powerful incentive to diversify its energy mix to reduce dependence on oil,” said Logan Goldie-Scot, an analyst at New Energy Finance in London.

Assuming initial capital costs for the solar projects of about $2.17 per watt of capacity installed, he added “The state could generate an internal rate of return of approximately 12 percent if it built a PV plant and sold the displaced oil on the international markets.”

Read more on Middle East solar energy: 

Interview: SolarReserve For the MENA Region?
Saudis Could Export Solar for the Next Twenty Centuries
Solar to Light Our Nights Gets Hotter

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