Renewable Energy Promotion Center Established in Egypt
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 07. 7.08
photo by Thierry via flickr
We’ve written before about the enormous solar potential of North Africa. In an effort to tap into that potential, a new renewable energy promotion and research center has opened near near Cairo.
Significant funding from European Agencies
The Regional Centre for Excellence for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency was open last week in Nasser City. The $30 million center received financial support in the form of grants from the European Union and the EU Commission in Egypt, the German Agency for Technical Cooperation, and the Danish Development Agency. The Egyptian Ministry of Electricity and Energy contributed $6.3 million of its own funds.
Renewable energy training, research, promtion
The center intends to carry out research for solar and wind energy projects, as well as provide consultancy services for the public and private sector, and running training programs to expand renewable energy around the region.
In addition to Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen will be involved in the governing process of the center.
It may be some time before the necessary transmission or energy storage infrastructure is in place for the Sahara to power the world, but this center may move the region one step down the road to making that a reality.
via :: ENN
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There are two big infrastructure problems to having the world's deserts power the rest of the world.
The first is storage. This can be solved with batteries, hydrogen production, production of hydrocarbons or alcohols from water and atmospheric CO2, or maybe something completely new I've never heard of. Some of these even have the advantage of being easily transportable for use either far away or for off-grid applications like driving, trucking, flying, and shipping (though for the first two, PHEV can put most of the energy needs back on-grid, which is much more efficient than making fuels, and commercial ships could be nuclear and thus need almost no fuel at all).
The second problem is transmission. This is already a problem now, as about 27% of the world's electricity is lost as heat while being transported from power plants to the users. This is often cited as a reason to encourage on-site generation. Higher voltages tend to reduce losses, but the holy grail here would be superconductors that work at high enough temperatures to be used on the grid and that are cheap enough to actually get used. Of course, to really get zero loss we would need to change the grid over to DC, but even with AC superconductors have incredibly low resistances. With a DC superconducting grid we could send power from Africa to Europe, China, or India and back, or from the American Southwest and the deserts of South and Central America throughout the New World.
It'll happen. It is just a question of when. I'm excited.