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• 2008-May-14 - Alegeria Building Desert Solar Panel Power Plant
ALGIERS, Algeria (Dow Jones)--An Algerian state-controlled power company is erecting a forest of billboard-sized mirrors in the middle of the desert in the country's first large-scale attempt to harvest solar energy from the Sahara and potentially transmit it to consumers thousands of miles away in Europe.
Algeria wants to lay high voltage power lines to connect its electricity grid directly to Spain and Italy: a critical step to sending electricity across vast distances to new markets. Doing so would position the North African country - already a key natural gas supplier in Europe - to snap up an even larger share of the European energy market, which is moving to boost the role of renewable sources in its energy mix. 'There's no question we want to do it: we have the space for it, we have the (solar) radiation,' Algeria's Oil Minister Chakib Khelil said in a recent interview in the Algerian capital.
So far the Algerian government is having trouble winning commitments to sell its solar-powered electricity to European utilities at a premium to cover costs because governments are reluctant to pay more to Algieria suppliers when they are paying subsidies to promote their own renewable energy industries.
But the European Commission aims for a 20% increase in energy from renewable sources by 2020 as part of a climate and energy package seeking approval from the European Parliament and member states. And experts like Luis Crespo, secretary-general of Protermo Solar, a solar energy industry group in Spain, say that the European Union will have to import renewable power to reach those goals.
Crespo says the continent will have to look elsewhere if it's to meet those proposed targets because installing sprawling solar and wind farms in Europe on the scale necessary would be hampered by a lack of appropriate space. 'We're talking about all of Europe getting 20% of its primary energy from renewable sources in 2020 - for that, it's certain that Europe will have to count on the importation of clean energy from Africa,' Crespo says. The technology to generate that proportion of renewable solar energy is already at work in Algeria and elsewhere. |
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