For decades Saudi Arabia has been a poster child for fossil-fuel waste:
The government sells gasoline to consumers for about 50 cents a gallon and electricity for as little as 1 cent a kilowatt-hour, a fraction of the lowest prices in the United States. As a result, the highways buzz with Cadillacs, Lincolns, and monster SUVs; few buildings have insulation; and people keep their home air conditioners running — often at temperatures that require sweaters — even when they go on vacation.
Saudi Arabia produces much of its electricity by burning oil, a practice that most countries abandoned long ago, reasoning that they could use coal and natural gas instead and save oil for transportation, an application for which there is no mainstream alternative. Most of Saudi Arabia’s power plants are colossally inefficient, as are its air conditioners, which consumed 70 percent of the kingdom’s electricity in 2013. Although the kingdom has just 30 million people, it is the world’s sixth-largest consumer of oil.
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The Saudis burn about a quarter of the oil they produce — and their domestic consumption has been rising at an alarming 7 percent a year, nearly three times the rate of population growth. According to a widely read December 2011 report by Chatham House, a British think tank, if this trend continues, domestic consumption could eat into Saudi oil exports by 2021 and render the kingdom a net oil importer by 2038.
That outcome would be cataclysmic for Saudi Arabia. The kingdom’s political stability has long rested on the “ruling bargain,” whereby the royal family provides citizens, who pay no personal income taxes, with extensive social services funded by oil exports. Left unchecked, domestic consumption could also limit the nation’s ability to moderate global oil prices through its swing reserve — the extra petroleum it can pump to meet spikes in global demand. If Saudi rulers want to maintain control at home and preserve their power on the world stage, they must find a way to use less oil.
Solar, they have decided, is an obvious alternative.
Well, they do get plenty of sun:
In addition to having some of the world’s richest oil fields, Saudi Arabia also has some of the world’s most intense sunlight. (On a map showing levels of solar radiation, with the sunniest areas colored deep red, the kingdom is as blood-red as a raw steak.) Saudi Arabia also has vast expanses of open desert seemingly tailor-made for solar-panel arrays.
Solar-energy prices have fallen by about 80 percent in the past few years, due to a rapid increase in the number of Chinese factories cranking out inexpensive solar panels, more-efficient solar technology, and mounting interest by large investors in bankrolling solar projects. Three years ago, Saudi Arabia announced a goal of building, by 2032, 41 gigawatts of solar capacity, slightly more than the world leader, Germany, has today. According to one estimate, that would be enough to meet about 20 percent of the kingdom’s projected electricity needs — an aggressive target, given that solar today supplies virtually none of Saudi Arabia’s energy and, as of 2012, less than 1 percent of the world’s.
I suppose that’s one way to address the problem:
In October, the World Bank estimated that Saudi Arabia spends more than 10 percent of its GDP on these [energy] subsidies. That comes to about $80 billion a year — more than a third of the kingdom’s budget.
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Aramco sells oil to the Saudi Electricity Company for about $4 a barrel, roughly the cost of production. Even with the global price of oil down to about $60 a barrel as of this writing (a drop of about 40 percent since June 2014), Saudi Arabia forgoes some $56 on every barrel it uses at home. That gap will become far greater if, as many experts expect, the global price rebounds.
My understanding was that sandy desert was less than ideal for solar deployment due to panel erosion and the like?
Exactly. Simply cleaning the sand off the panels is a huge task.
I smell a simple ‘greenwashing’ public relations effort.
Australia and Israel also have plenty of sun, and problems with fresh-water supplies, and even those countries don’t deploy much solar. Australia does, however, use renewable wind energy projects to run reverse-osmosis desalinization plants, which is an ideal use for such infrastructure, because you can literally store the energy-intensive products of the irregularly-supplied power-source in tanks, for later on-demand use, like a battery-equivalent. Meanwhile, fossil plants provide good base-load and peak electricity supply for ordinary industrial and individual consumers.
Photo bioreactors (algae growing tanks) could be a good idea in such sunny countries as an alternative to conventional farming (irrigation). The alae could be used either as animal feed or converted into diesel fuel.