Selling sunshine

AP/Houston Chronicle:

It's a vision that has long enticed energy planners: solar panels stretching out over vast swaths of the Sahara desert, soaking up sun to generate clean, green power.

Now Algeria, aware that its oil and gas riches will one day run dry, is gearing up to tap its sunshine on an industrial scale for itself and even Europe.

Work on its first plant began late last month at Hassi R'mel, 260 miles south of Algiers, the capital.

The plant will be a hybrid, using both sun and natural gas to generate 150 megawatts. Of that, 25 megawatts will come from giant parabolic mirrors stretching over nearly 2 million square feet — roughly 45 football fields.

Experts say it's the first project of its kind to combine gas and steam turbines with solar thermal input in a hybrid plant.

The plant should be ready in 2010, and the longer-term goal is to export 6,000 megawatts of solar-generated power to Europe by 2020, about a tenth of current electricity consumption in Germany.

"Our potential in thermal solar power is four times the world's energy consumption, so you can have all the ambitions you want with that," said Tewfik Hasni, managing director of New Energy Algeria, or NEAL, a company created by the Algerian government in 2002 to develop renewable energy.

The project is still at an early stage and faces daunting financial and technological obstacles. Solar power's supporters say it will take 10 years for it to become economically competitive, and though undersea cables to Sicily and Spain are planned for construction from 2010 to 2012, it isn't known who will finance them.

But as the world grows increasingly anxious about climate change and dwindling fossil fuels, ideas that once sounded like science fiction are becoming ever more plausible.

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The hybrid nature of this project gives it a chance. It means that it can supply energy when the sun does not shine which is approximately half the time. One of the assumptions also has to be that there will be no need to store excess energy when the sun shines. There are several sunshine projects in Europe too, some using the sun to generate steam for power. One thing that cannot be ignored is that if they were as efficient and as cheap as petroleum in producing power, people would already be using them. Until they are, they are just an expensive alternative.