Saudi Arabia to ditch oil heritage for solar
Published Tuesday, 4th March 2008
Do you ever wake up in the morning and want to be something else? Change your job entirely? Become a tightrope walker or a tattooist? “It’s not that easy Greenbang,” you might say. “I trained for years to become what I am – I can’t change that overnight.” If you’re a little leery of snap changes, then you might want to take a leaf out of Saudi Arabia’s book.
Saudi Arabia isn’t afraid to get a makeover. It’s shedding its oil baron’s ten gallon hat for some eco-biz hemp fisherman’s pants as it prepares to go from an oil exporter to a power exporter, all about solar.
According to AFP, the country’s oil minister said:
“One of the research efforts that we are going to undertake is to see how we make Saudi Arabia a centre for solar energy research and hopefully over the next 30 to 50 years we will be a major megawatt exporter.
“In the same way we are an oil exporter, we can also be an exporter of power.”
Go Saudis!
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Actually this is not a bad idea at all for a country like Saudi Arabia, where the average temperature in summer is over 40 degree Celcius and sun shines over its territory all over the year. Solar cells are expensive to implement at first but they have little operating cost and they can be easily integrated with existing grid lines, which would off load the burden from fossile fueled power station, gradually moving to all solar cell solution.