Sun Could Power Arab States

Jan. 20, 2009 -- 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 said, 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.

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The $22-billion city which is planned to spread over 6.5 square kilometers (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 said.

He said that even if the cost of heating water might seem marginal in terms of a country's energy bill, a 200-liter 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.