Solar Energy instead of Oil as a Source of Wealth in the Arab World
Desert Solar Power Facility
By Ibrahim Mohamed
The agreement of the EU countries, the largest importer of oil and gas in the world, on adopting a new energy policy indicates a new era in the history of its consumption. This agreement provides for accelerating the pace of relying on renewable energies, whose share should increase to 20% in the European energy market by 2020. It also provides for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions at the same rate by the same year. This means reducing consumption of energy sources that do not pollute the environment, especially coal and oil. It also means greater investment in renewable energies, especially solar energy, which is the most readily available and guaranteed source compared to wind, as well as agricultural and animal products, which can be used for heating and fuel production.
What reinforces this expectation is the substantial increase in the demand for production facilities of the aforementioned energy, in addition to the attitude of other countries to increasingly rely on this source, such as Japan and the US. Some US states, particularly California, have already begun to heavily invest in it.
At the demand level, the world trade in the field of solar energy equipment has grown in record rates in the past years. For example, Germany’s exports of such equipment have increased by five times over the past three years, hitting €1 billion by the end of 2004. The market share of renewable energies in Germany hit about 8% last year, against less than 4% at the beginning of this century.
According to forecasts, the solar energy market will grow by 300-1000% in the next five years in Germany, Spain, Italy and other main EU countries. Investments in the last two years also achieved records in the field of renewable energies. According to the Renewable Energy and Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21), companies and countries invested $38 billion in 2005, against $30 billion in 2004. Half of these funds were invested in solar energy.
In this context, it is noticed that these investments were not confined to giant energy companies, such as Shell and Total, but rather included other companies that found it a promising sphere for profit and meeting requirements of the environment. For example, the American Applied Materials, Inc. is looking forward to achieving sales of the aforementioned equipment for $500 million in the next three years. The State of California is seeking to become the largest producer of the same equipment following Japan and Germany in less than ten years. This attitude is supported by the allocation of a financial fund with capital of $2.9 billion to support families and institutions that wish to use solar energy in their consumption. In Germany, institutions are support by about 40%. This support is not confined to institutions, but rather includes universities, institutes and scientific centers involved in the development and use of renewable energies.
At a time when companies and countries from all over the world are embarking upon investment in solar energy, the Arab World still considers it an issue of secondary importance in spite of the current substantial financial liquidity available in the oil-rich countries. Apart from plans for the construction of several projects in the UAE, Egypt and Jordan, there is nothing important at the present time at both levels of planning for more projects or the production equipment of such energy.
Remarkably, this weak interest is coinciding with significant steps that are being taken by research centers in German and Europe to find new techniques that can make the transfer of solar energy economically viable compared with traditional energy, at a time when European bodies announced that the Arab World is not important for Europe as a source of oil and gas, but solar energy. This is not attributed to the few number of days when the sun shines in most European countries, but to the lack of large areas fit for setting up solar energy generation plants, as is the case with North African countries, especially Algeria.
Recently, German experts made statements to the effect that these countries can be a source of meeting 15% of the German market needs during the next four decades. In applying this percentage to all over the EU, we can conceive the sales volume and enormous profits that Arab countries can achieve from the exploitation of solar energy, especially as the EU is the biggest importer of energy in the world. Hence, we can say that the sun will be a guarantor of energy sources in the future and a source of wealth in the countries that invest in a timely manner.
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