World Bank invests in MENA Solar

There have been a number of alternative energy announcements coincident with COP15. A Treehugger from Ottawa, Canada Michael Richard Graham reports on announcement from the World Bank.

Photo: Sandia National Laboratory, Public domain

MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) is one of the principle regions around the globe that benefits from a higher solar radiance. “Harnessing the sun’s energy falling on just 6,000 square kilometers of desert” with solar thermal electric power plants, of “between 50 and 200 MW in size in different locations across North Africa,” estimate the German Aerospace Center, “would supply energy equivalent to the entire oil production of the Middle East of 9 billion barrels a year.”

The World Bank is announcing that 5.5 billion dollars will be invested in concentrated solar energy projects in five countries of the Middle-East and North-Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia), which makes a lot more sense than investing in solar projects in cloudy Germany, for example. The World Bank’s Clean Technology Fund has already approved 750 million dollars, and this financing will “mobilize an additional 4.85 billion dollars from other sources.”

In a statement, the World Bank said:

The proposed gigawatt-scale deployment through 11 commercial-scale power plants over a three- to five-year time-frame would provide the critical mass of investments necessary to attract significant private sector interest, benefit from economies of scale to reduce cost, result in learning in diverse operating conditions, and manage risk.

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