A significant and unforeseen drop in the cost to produce solar energy in recent years may enable Saudi Arabia to turbocharge its ambitions to diversify its economy and free up more oil for exports, as the Kingdom continues ahead with the development of several solar installations.
A recent item in the UK-based The Guardian highlights the story of how a rapid radical reduction in the price of PV solar came about, how the IEA didn’t see it coming, and how solar power may now dominate the renewables sector in the future as “insanely cheap.”
“In the year 2000, the International Energy Agency (IEA) made a prediction that would come back to haunt it: by 2020, the world would have installed a grand total of 18 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity. Seven years later, the forecast would be proven spectacularly wrong when roughly 18 gigawatts of solar capacity were installed in a single year alone,” Royce Kermelovs writes in The Guardian.
In recent weeks, the Saudi Green Initiative and the Middle East Green Initiative have been announced.
The story notes that the rapid radical reduction in the price of PV solar is “a story about Chinese industrial might backed by American capital, fanned by European political sensibilities and made possible largely thanks to the pioneering work of an Australian research team.”
Areas across Saudi Arabia receive over 3,000 hours of sunlight a year, making the Kingdom the envy of many other nations across the world which are eying solar as it continues to get cheaper to embrace as an energy solution.
Recently, Saudi Arabia announced an expansion in its near-term plans to generate power from solar and wind, announcing the completion of the Sakaka solar plant and celebrating the halfway point in its construction of a large wind farm at Dumat Al-Jindal on the Red Sea coast. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that seven more solar plants were planned and would break ground soon.
According to Arab News, the seven planned solar plants, in addition to the Sakaka and Dumat Al-Jandal projects, “would produce more than 3,600 megawatts….power more than 600,000 homes, and reduce more than 7 million tons of greenhouse emissions,” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said.
“Some of these projects have achieved new records, where we registered the lowest cost of purchasing electricity produced from solar energy in the world,” the Crown Prince said.
The Guardian story on the rise of solar is a fascinating read on how technology, investment, and innovation made made solar power “the cheapest power humanity has seen – and no one saw it coming.”
