SOLAR ENERGY IS THE WAY TO GO for UAE

Abu Dhabi: Solar energy is the way to go for the UAE, an expert on renewable energy has advised.

Ray Noble, Director of BIPV (Building Integrated Photovoltaics) and a former UK government advisor on renewable energy, was addressing developers and members from the construction industry at a seminar titled "Global warming and its solutions".

"The planet is a very clever thing. It can repair itself, provided you don't go too far," he said, pointing out the critical need to act now against global warming. Many people believe that the burning of fossil fuels causes global warming. Analysing this, together with the fact that over two billion people worldwide have no access to electricity, leads to the conclusion that fuel needs are in some way related to global warming, Noble explained, adding that the future is for renewable energy and gases, predominantly hydrogen.

While wind and marine energy are not the right answer for the UAE, solar energy is the ideal option, he said. "The UAE gets some of the highest amounts of light from the sun compared to anywhere in the world."

There are two ways of tapping into solar energy. By using Photovoltaic (PV) or solar cells to directly convert sunlight into electricity or by using solar energy to heat water and then to use the steam to generate electricity.

http://www.gulfnews.com/nation/Environment/10241148.html

Friendship for a cause - can it materialize?

NEW DELHI: While bilateral relations between Pakistan and India may not be very cordial at the moment, businessmen across the border have found a new area for collaboration - alternate energy.

About 30 Pakistani companies sent representatives to Delhi during the Renewable Energy Expo 2008 that ended on Saturday to scout for new technology and expertise to skirt over chronic energy shortage in that country.

"We had 38 businessmen from Pakistan with various business interests," said Waqar Ahmed, managing director of Business Horizons, the trade promotion group that brought the Pakistani delegation to India.

Ahmed said Pakistani business houses were either looking at setting up of power plants to feed into the national grid, or set up captive plants for their own units.

Making the visit were some of Pakistan's top companies that included Sapphire group, which runs 13 textile weaving and spinning mills, travel company Sitara that also has subsidiaries in Canada and Uzbekistan, the Crescent Group with multiple business interests such as oil exploration, financial services and textiles, and Pakistan's second largest textiles group Gulistan.

Interestingly, the day the Delhi expo was inaugurated, leading Pakistani financial paper Business Recorder had published a two-page supplement on event.

Reports in the Pakistani media say the electricity shortfall was as high as 7,000 MW this summer after 24 power generating units stopped operations due a severe shortage of furnace oil.

Pakistan has a target to generate at least 9,700 MW through renewable energy by 2030, or about five percent of its installed capacity.

"The government has already issued 93 letters of intent to private companies for setting up wind power projects," said Ahmed.

The 93 projects will have a generation capacity of about 4,600 MW.

Sitara Chemicals Industries, which operates the largest chemicals complex in Pakistan, has ambitious plans that hinge on the ability to secure a reliable source of energy.

"We are already running a 80 MW plant, which supplies electricity to the complex and the state power board. We need to generate 50 MW at least, which may go up to 200 MW," Sitara Chemicals chief executive Muhammad Adrees told IANS.

The head of the Rs 140 crore company is keen to import Indian technology, as he felt "there was an affinity to the ground conditions in Pakistan".

Preliminary talks have been held with several companies, including Tata BP Solar. "We have not yet decided to set up a renewable energy power plant, but still exploring our options," said Adrees.

The Sitara group already has an Indian connection, having sourced two chemical plants from here. "Right now, we have 20 Indians working in our complex in connection with setting up these two plants," said Adrees.

It is still logistically a challenge to import equipment from India. "When we had to get our machinery from Delhi, it had to be routed through Mumbai to reach Karachi port. If we could have transported directly by road from Delhi, it would have saves costs," he said.

India has been ranked third on the Ernst and Young Renewable Energy attractiveness model. The country has an installed capacity of 12,600 MW, out of which about 8,700 MW is generated through wind power.

By 2011, it hopes to increase the total generation from renewable energy to 14,000 MW. As per government targets, renewable energy will account for 10 per cent of total power generation by 2012 and 20 per cent by 2020.

Reference: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/News_By_Industry/Pakistan_looks_to_India_for_green_energy_know-how/articleshow/3407664.cms

The Saudi Arabia Of Solar Energy

The Saudi Arabia Of Solar Energy will be "Saudi Arabia" itself.

Very interesting read regarding the future potential of Solar Energy generation in (and transmission from) in Saudi Arabia...



In the wake of the first Gulf War, the U.S. Army assessed Saudi Arabia's solar energy resource potential in a classified effort to determine how oil fires had affected the region.

The results were clear and surprising. In addition to being a vast petroleum repository, the desert nation was also the heart of the most potentially productive region on the planet for harvesting power from the sun. In other words, Saudi Arabia was the Saudi Arabia of solar energy.

Sitting in the center of the so-called Sun Belt, the country is part of a vast, rainless region reaching from the western edge of North Africa to the eastern edge of Central Asia that boasts the best solar energy resources on Earth. With the cost of oil skyrocketing, this belt is attracting the attention of a growing number of European leaders, who are embracing an ambitious proposal to harvest this solar energy for their nations.

The irony is inescapable and the story a familiar one, as the developed world again turns to the less developed countries in hopes of powering their economies. More important, it highlights an unappreciated implication of a solar-powered economy: The end of the oil age will not necessarily bring an end to the ugly geopolitics, resource wars and national rivalries that oil created.

The Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation, or TREC, is the brainchild of a consortium led by the controversial Club of Rome and includes influential members like the German Aerospace Bureau and several universities in Europe and the Middle East.

TREC is spearheading a political initiative to build a so-called transmission supergrid by concentrating solar thermal power plants, wind turbines and long distance power lines to supply energy to Europe. The proposed power plants would simultaneously provide energy to seawater desalination plants in the Middle East and North Africa.



While the wild-eyed scheme might seem better suited for conspiracy theories than reality, it has attracted a growing number of impressive and powerful backers. In 2007, Prince El Hassan of Jordan, who has called for implementing the plan with an Apollo-like program, presented the plan during a European Union parliamentary session. Nicolas Sarkozy, the recently elected President of France, and U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown have both publicly endorsed the supergrid project in recent weeks.

In July, Sarkozy hosted the inaugural meeting of the "Union for the Mediterranean" in Paris. The Union, which seeks to promote relations between North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, considers TREC's solar energy proposal one of its top priorities. Meanwhile, the escalating conflict in Georgia, which has exposed the extent of Europe's energy insecurity, has undoubtedly increased the TREC plan's appeal.

While TREC's plan is nowhere near becoming a reality, it seems inevitable that, in one form or another, someone will try to capitalize on the vast solar energy resources available in the sun-soaked countries of the Sun Belt.

While it is technically possible to convert sunlight into electricity anywhere, it costs far less to do so in areas that receive the most powerful forms of sunlight--sunlight that loses the least amount of radiant energy while moving from space to earth. The Sun Belt receives the lion's share of this energy-rich sunlight.

While speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Spain, in July, Arnulf Jaeger-Walden, one of Europe's leading energy authorities, said that less than 0.4% of the solar energy that falls on the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East would satisfy all of Europe's energy needs.

The opportunity isn't lost on Sun Belt countries. In March, Saudi Arabia's oil minister, Ali al-Nuaimi, said the country hopes to become as expert with solar energy as it is with oil. While Saudi Arabia has long toyed with solar power for small projects, such as a 1980s "Solar Village" program to develop the use of the technology in remote regions, its aspirations appear to be growing.

"For a country like Saudi Arabia ... one of the most important sources of energy to look at and to develop is solar energy," al-Nuaimi told the French oil newsletter Petrostrategies. "One of the research efforts that we are going to undertake is to see how we make Saudi Arabia a center for solar energy research, and hopefully over the next 30 to 50 years we will be a major megawatt exporter."

In Hassi R'mel, Algeria, 260 miles south of Algiers, construction has begun on a new power plant using a combination of solar and natural gas. The hope is to generate 150 megawatts of electricity by 2010, with 25 megawatts from a solar array stretching nearly 2 million square feet. The long-term goal is to export more than 6,000 megawatts of solar-generated power to Europe by 2020.

"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," Tewfik Hasni, managing director of New Energy Algeria, or NEAL, a company created by the Algerian government in 2002 to develop renewable energy, told the Associated Press last year.

This is why, barring a major technological breakthrough, the economics of solar energy may someday look much like the economics of fossil fuels. Energy security ultimately means more than access to energy; it means access to cheap energy. And like it or not, the Sun Belt has the cheapest solar energy in the world in vast quantities.

"In the same way we are an oil exporter," said Saudi Arabia's Ali al-Nuaimi, "we can also be an exporter of power."

By William Pentland (Forbes.com)
http://www.forbes.com/home/2008/08/21/saudi-arabia-solar-biz-energy-cx_wp_0822solar.html

Are you listening?

Excellent artwork...

Earth day with a twist :)

Bio-fuel or Food?

Here is a very interesting analysis by a senior columnist of daily DAWN:

"The rising world food prices seem to have forced the UK government to take a second look at its transport fuel policy which compels suppliers to provide 2.5 per cent of their sales as bio-fuel. The policy took effect last week. The proportion is to rise to five in 2010.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in a statement last Tuesday, ahead of a meeting on food prices with industry leaders and development experts, that if a UK government review of the impact of biofuels now under way “shows that we need to change our approach, we will also push for change in EU biofuels targets”.

The review was launched in February and is due to deliver initial conclusions next month, with a full report by the end of June.

As food prices have risen environmental and social groups have intensified their campaigns, arguing that governments are diverting production away from food and animal feed. Until now, the government’s policy has been to support the increased use of biofuels.

Biofuels produced from crops such as corn and soya provide a small but fast-growing share of motor fuel, and had been expected to make an important contribution to meeting growing demand for fossil fuel.

Biofuels have strong political support in many countries. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, said last week: “Those rising global food prices have nothing to do [with] biofuels.”

Agriculture diplomats have expressed concern that governments are focusing on biofuels as the main reason for rising food prices. They argued that the use of agricultural land and crops for fuel is only part of a mix of problems including higher demand in Asia, climate change, declining growth in farming productivity and water scarcity.

The European Commission has been defending its 10 per cent biofuel mix target for motor fuels. Asked by reporters last Monday whether the EU was reconsidering its position on the biofuels target, a spokesman said: “The answer is very simple. No.”

Meanwhile, the world is still not very sure what is causing the international oil prices to shoot up so steeply over the last one year. The price has almost doubled in the 12 months from $60 to $120 a barrel. The producers claim that there has not been any disruption in supplies during this period. There has also been no significant increase in consumption in major consuming countries like the US, Europe, Japan and the UK.

China’s consumption is said to be rising at a breakneck rate. Chinese demand for oil is said to be accelerating ahead of the Olympics with crude oil imports up by almost a quarter to 4.07 million barrels a day in March, compared with the same month last year. For the first quarter, crude imports rose by 14 per cent compared with the same period last year. But then it has also been busy in Africa exploring new fields and developing them.

One would certainly find it hard to disagree with the argument that the declining dollar could have forced the exporters to push up the prices of their commodity to protect the purchasing parity of the currency they receive in exchange for their oil. But the increase in the price of oil is decidedly too high compared to the dollar’s decline.

So, there certainly appears to be a very generous speculative component in today’s oil prices. But who is fueling this speculation and why? Nobody has an answer.

Opec ministers have blamed rising oil prices on speculators and the weakness in the dollar at last week’s meeting of the International Energy Forum in Rome.

But in an effort to reassure the market, Opec’s secretary general highlighted the cartel’s plans to expand capacity. Right now, Opec has 120 projects worth $160 billion just to increase capacity by five million barrels a day to 2012. However, Opec is said to have no plans to meet before September, suggesting little prospect of any relief on supplies before then.

Developments in the dollar are likely to dominate oil price movements in the short-term and could even drag Brent crude as high as $125 per barrel this quarter. Nevertheless, with a recovery of the dollar and easing of oil market tightness in the pipeline, the Capital Economics (CE) a London based research firm expects prices to drop back to around $85 per barrel by the end of the year.

The three key drivers of the recent rise in oil prices (a falling dollar, tight fundamentals and speculative pressures) look set to ease and probably reverse in the second half of the year.

Another factor blamed for high oil prices is the inflow of capital from investors, partly as a hedge against general inflation. However, the argument for buying commodities to hedge against commodity-driven inflation is dangerously circular and it is only a matter of time, according to CE, before fundamental demand and supply conditions reassert themselves.

The demand for commodities such as industrial metals is expected to moderate on slower economic growth, while the supply response to high food prices has historically been quicker than in energy markets. The upshot is that as general inflationary pressures ease, speculative positions in oil should also be unwound, potentially leading to a very sharp correction.

The increases in world oil and food prices have devastated the economies of low and middle income oil importing countries. With soaring oil and food import bills and not much to export to pay for the costly oil and food, these countries are now looking at multilateral aid agencies for help. But there is said to be an upside as well to this steep increase in the world prices of these two essentials.

At $120 a barrel, oil exploration and development is said to have become not only an economically viable venture the world over but profitable as well for even those countries which are blessed with shallow fields. At these prices even the windmill driven energy and solar energy too are said to have become commercially economical for developing countries.

And those developing agricultural countries which so far had found it economically unprofitable to invest in food crops because of the heavy subsidies that the rich countries were giving to their farmers would now find it commercially viable to grow food commodities for home consumption as well as for export."

Reference: http://dawn.com/2008/04/28/ebr18.htm

Pakistan: Sugar mills to the rescue

ISLAMABAD: In order to meet the growing power requirements of the industry, government has decided to develop co-power generation plants on fast track basis. In this regard the government has exempted such power plants from the fulfilling of pre-qualification criteria, submission of feasibility study and obtaining of Letter of Intent (LOIs) from Private Power Infrastructure Board (PPIB).

According to the guidelines prepared by PPIB for facilitating the setting up of co generation power plants in the country on fast track basis, the sugar industry will be issued Letter of Support (LOS) by PPIB after the tariff determination by National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA). The tariff will be levelised for 30 years and will be available for 60 MWs or above the capacity based on 28 percent net thermal efficiency.

According to the guidelines, the existing standardised power purchase Agreement (PPA) and Implementation Agreement (IA) will be modified to provide Power co-generation specific projects. The incentives available to the Independent Power Producers for power generation projects 2002 would also be available to the power co-generation units of sugar mills.

The power generated by the sugar industry will be purchased by the National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC) concerned at agreed/negotiated and competitive rates to be approved by NEPRA. Power Sale/Purchase Agreements, valid during the life of the power co-generation units will be signed with sugar mills on the lines of the agreements signed with IPPs. Bagasse and imported/local coal will be consumed as per requirement of the plant without any limitation of inter-changeability.

The sugar mills selected for power co-generation will be required to set up the plant on the fast track basis, not later than 36 months of issuance of Letter of Support (LOS). Power co-generation plants set up by sugar industry will not be treated as part of sugar industry but as a separate entity for tax purposes and the existing tariff rules and guidelines for the Independent Power Producers (IPPs) would be applicable for such power generation plants/units.

Government has announced guidelines for power co-generation plants to be set up by sugar industry that would be able to bridge the gap between supply and demand in the winter season by supplying power to national grid.

There are 83 sugar mills in the country having a potential to produce 3,000MW electricity to national grid in the coming years. Co-generation projects will be based on bagasse (sugarcane waste) during the cane-crushing season (November-February) as main fuel whereas from March to October on coal as the main fuel. Sugar industry will be able to supply power to national grid during winter season when the hydel generation is at its lowest ebb. Pakistan Sugar Mills Association (PSMA) has sought tariff determination of 60MW and above co-generation power projects for delivery of electricity and submitted tariff petition to National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) in this regard.

PSMA has submitted a typical two part tariff structure with an energy tariff of Rs 3.368/Kwh for the energy actually dispatched and a capacity tariff of Rs 4.506/Kwh based on contract capacity or tested capacity for a period of ten years. PSMA has also sought an energy charge of Rs 3.368 /Kwh tariff and Rs 1.377/Kwh capacity tariff for year 11 to 30 years.

This means that the number of stakeholders in the power sector are soon to increase requiring new processes to resolve mutual conflicts and ensure smooth supply of electricity. Good news any way!

Source: Zafar Bhutta, Daily Times, March 25, 2008
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008%5C03%5C25%5Cstory_25-3-2008_pg5_9