With Europe hungry for clean energy, fossil fuel supplier Algeria plans to enter the solar power business and add the renewable resource to its portfolio of exports across the Mediterranean, according to Reuters.
The OPEC member aims to get its environmentally friendly product in the same place as it mines oil and gas – the Sahara, a place of guaranteed sunshine and lots of empty land.
“Let the Sahara of Algeria be the hub of energy to Europe,” Tewfik Hasni, president of New Energy Algeria Ltd (NEAL), a vehicle for Algeria’s alternative energy strategy, told Reuters.
“It’s not enough to have solar energy. You also have to have the land to implement your project,” he said on the sidelines of an energy conference in the western Algerian city of Oran.
Africa’s second-largest country, Algeria is 4.5 times the size of France and most of its 33 million population live on the northern coastal strip. Its desert south is baked by the sun.
“The potential is huge. We will be obliged – in fact it’s our duty – to develop this potential clean power,” Hasni said. “The energy of the future could be solar.”
NEAL, in partnership with Spain’s Abener Energia Spa, starts construction next year of a 250-million-euro hybrid solar-gas plant at Hassi R’Mel in central M’Zab province with a capacity of 150 megawatts due to come on stream in late 2009.
Ambitious
The combined cycle plant’s solar capacity will be about 30 MW, generated by 100 hectares of thermal solar panels – mirrors than concentrate the sun’s energy into heat conductors that transfer the energy to turbine engines.
Hasni is ambitious – he says that if sufficient acreage was made available, solar power from Algeria could in theory eventually supply the whole of Europe and beyond.
The plant will be the first of a series of combined-cycle hybrid plants that NEAL aims should have capacity of 500 MW or 5 percent of national generating capacity, by 2010.
The initial priority will be serving the local power market but longer term, exports to Europe are the goal. As solar technology improves, Hasni plans to establish pure solar generation plants without the need for gas and gradually expand solar power’s capacity.
But he acknowledges that Algeria’s plans to supply power to Europe presuppose much greater flexibility in European power markets to enable Algeria to connect to its customers’ grids.
“The problem is access to the market,” he said. “In Europe you have to revise all your policies for the transportation of power. With such a strategy, you can imagine the opportunity for using the hub energy of Algeria.”
Hasni is assured of political backing at home.
NEAL is owned 45 percent by state energy giant Sonatrach, 45 percent by gas utility Sonelgaz and 10 percent by private agro-industrial firm Semouleries Industrielles de la Mitidja.
Hasni senses that, in Europe too, the political atmosphere is becoming more welcoming to diversity of energy supply.
He points to the concern about energy supplies generated by a blackout that left expanses of West Europe without energy earlier this month when an overload in Germany’s power network triggered outages, leaving millions without electricity.
The incident showed that “you should give much more flexibility to the power markets in Europe to diversify sources of supply,” he said.