Gulf riches could supercharge concentrated solar

By Giles Parkinson on 10 December 2012

At the climate change talks in Doha, both Saudi Arabia and the host country Qatar reinforced their intentions to invest tens of billions of dollars into large-scale CSP – which includes solar thermal and concentrated solar PV technologies. The biggest oil and gas exporters in the world want to become, well, the Saudi Arabia and Qatar of the solar industry too.The concentrated solar power (CSP) sector is expected to finally spring to life – and begin its long-awaited journey down the cost curve – as the oil and gas-rich Gulf nations deploy their massive sovereign wealth in solar technologies.

Saudi Arabia intends to spend $110 billion on installing more than 41GW of solar over the coming two decades, including 25GW of CSP – aware that replacing its oil-based power plants will free up more crude to be exported into the international market. Qatar intends to build 1.8GW of large-scale solar by 2020 and has a 30 per cent renewables target by 2030. Much of this will come from CSP – and the first pilot plants featuring parabolic trough technologies were opened last week to coincide with Doha.

They are not alone in the Gulf region. Abu Dhabi was the first mover in this space, taking $15 billion out of its sovereign fund to invest in solar. It recently opened its 100MW Shams 1 CSP plant, has built the futuristic Masdar clean energy city, and is the home of the International Renewable Energy Agency. Dubai is building a 1GW solar park, and Kuwait, which already has a 50MW CSP facility, is aiming for 15 per cent renewables (almost all CSP) by 2030.

“The Gulf has oil and gas, and it has the sun,” one UAE official told me this week in the Gulf pavilion at Doha. “And oil and gas are finite.”

Indeed, in the final days of the conference, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Bahrain, said they had pledged to reduce their carbon emissions, as part of a plan to diversify their economies away from fossil fuels.