World Bank to invest $5.5 billion in North African solar
The World Bank announced $5.5 billion dollars of investment money for North African solar power projects. Initial investments will be $750 million dollars from the Clean Technology Fund with the rest on the way from other sources. Planned to be completed by 2015, the project would span five countries and triple world wide concentrated solar power capacity. Construction of the 11 facilities in the project is expected to commence in 2011.
In the U.S., such grandiose generation projects as the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams would be dwarfed by this North African solar effort. The North African project alone is equivalent to half of all the Bureau of Reclamation’s projects combined for its size and expense. By 2020, the North African project should total 900 MW in capacity.
To put that in perspective, the facility producing the most power in the U.S. is the Palo Verde nuclear power station outside of Phoenix, Arizona. It cost $5.9 billion to build over the course of 12 years. It is rated at just over 3,700 MW, over four times as much as the aggregate of the proposed solar project. The North African facilities won’t generate nuclear waste, though.
The project will save (as compared to traditional power generation mixes) 1.7 million tons of greenhouse gases per year. This is the same as taking 600,000 gas burning vehicles off the road. The solar tech being used is called Concentrated Solar Power, which concentrates solar energy to boil water and drive a turbine. A U.K. government operated site suggests over 10,000 jobs may be created by this project, though the World Bank declined to include this figure in their materials.
When completed, the project will span Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia. It will provide power to nations in the area as well as to Europe, where most of the production jobs are likely to be sourced.
Figures on U.S. economic contributions are not currently available, though the U.K. claims to be contributing 56 million pounds or $91 million USD.
Though hardly the best bang for the buck in electricity, the project could change the economics and the quality of life for many in the region. If nothing else, it will create a market for a growing solar infrastructure and, according to the PR material, “accelerate cost reduction for a technology that could become least-cost globally.” Let’s hope so because in the mean time, it isn’t cheap power and won’t be producing around the clock.
