Sun 'could supply Gulf's day-time energy needs'

Ali Khalil Yahoo News 20 Jan 09;

ABU DHABI (AFP) – Oil-rich Gulf Arab states enjoy year-round sunshine but they remain slow in adopting environmental technologies to let them harvest their abundant solar power, industrialists said Tuesday.

"They should act, instead of talking about it," said Stefan Muller, the managing director of Asia Pacific region at Conergy, the German producer of solar and wind power technologies, who is promoting his company's products in the World Future Energy Summit and Exhibition in Abu Dhabi.

"These countries can produce all their day-time energy needs from solar power," Muller told AFP, speaking of the abundance of sunshine in the region which also sits on over 40 percent of world oil reserves.

Conergy is building a two megawatt roof-top solar power system in a Saudi university in the Red Sea city of Jeddah, which will be ready in March. Although the environment-friendly system is not enough to power the campus, it is the largest so far in the region, according to Muller.

Abu Dhabi's renewable energy company, Masdar, is building a 10 mw solar farm, also to be ready in March, to power the construction of its carbon neutral development, the Masdar City.

The 22-billion-dollar city which is planned to spread over 6.5 square kilometres (2.5 square miles) is expected to house 55,000 people when ready in 2015, and will run totally on renewable energy.

But apart from those two projects, the drive to introduce solar power in the Gulf region remains negligible. Even at household level, solar water heaters which are popular in Mediterranean countries, are rarely seen in the Gulf.

"The market here is moving very slowly... They are going in that direction but it is a slow process," said John Owen, regional representative of the Greek company SOLEUAE and MIDLAND Trading, as he spoke of the benefits of two types of solar water heaters displayed by his company in the exhibition.

He argued that the low use of such units in Gulf countries, despite the potential to recover their cost within four years, is because it has not been made mandatory by the governments.

"In Greece it became mandatory in 1972 ... When possible, it should be mandatory," he told AFP.

He said that even if the cost of heating water might seem marginal in terms of a country's energy bill, a 200-litre electric water boiler needs around three Kilowatts, which means that with a solar system "a huge amount of energy is saved on a large scale."

The United Arab Emirates tops the World Wide Fund chart of countries' per capita ecological footprint, while Kuwait comes third.

Muller pointed out that government incentives have helped enormously in promoting households' switch to cleaner energy in Germany, hinting that governments in the region should implement similar programmes.

Despite their huge wealth of oil and gas, Gulf countries are bound to join the bandwagon of environmental countries, Owen believes.

"You can't be seen as a country using oil only in today's environment. They have to look for the future as they can't keep burning oil," he said.

Muller agrees that the Gulf countries, mainly the wealthy emirate of Abu Dhabi, are heading in the right direction.

"If you look 2-3 years back, no body in this region talked about renewable energy... It is the fashion now," he said.

Jordanian trader Nidal Malhas, who is promoting China-made water heaters, acknowledged that the huge drop in oil prices due to the global economic crisis might reduce the momentum in switching to renewables as conventional power becomes cheaper.

"Demand increased when the price of oil products shot up, but now it is weaker after oil prices have tumbled," by some two thirds, Malhas spoke, reporting his company's experience in neighbouring Jordan.