Financial Times
By Pilita Clark, Environment Correspondent
Morocco’s hopes of turning its deserts into a global renewable energyhub took a big step forward on Thursday when the World Bank gave the green light to help pay for one of the world’s biggest concentrated solar power plants.
The Ouarzazate solar complex, south-east of Marrakesh, will cover an area the size of several football fields, and have a capacity of 500 megawatts when completed, enough to power around 90,000 homes.
The World Bank, which has been criticised by environmental campaigners in the past for not doing enough to back clean energy projects, will finance this first phase with a $200m loan, and another $97m will be lent through a clean technology fund it oversees.
Its first phase, a 160MW plant, will cost around $1bn and is to be built and operated by a private company that is due to be selected early next year.
“This is a significant chunk of change,” said Inger Andersen, World Bank vice-president for the Middle East and north Africa, who said the bank was helping several other countries develop concentrated solar plants, but none on the scale of the Ouarzazate plant.
The rest of the money for the initial phase of the plant, which is due to go on line in 2014, will come from other development banks and the Moroccan government, which has a $9bn “national solar plan” to build five commercial scale solar plants by 2020 with a total capacity of 2,000 megawatts. It already has a smaller plant in the east of the country supplying electricity to the national grid.
Morocco’s abundant sunshine, low humidity and large tracts of unused land near road networks and power lines make it an ideal place to build concentrated solar power plants.
These systems do not simply convert sunlight into electricity, like the solar panels found on household roofs, but use mirrors to focus, or concentrate, the sun’s rays to produce heat that can turn fluid into steam that drives a turbine to generate electricity.
Morocco has also been chosen as the first location for a German-led project to build a vast solar network across north Africa and the Middle East. Its private backers hope it will eventually hook into Europe’s electricity supply.
More than 200 concentrated solar power systems are now being planned or are operating around the world, mostly in the US, followed by Spain, though most are far smaller than the one planned in Ouarzazate.
Morocco’s solar plans are being closely watched in Africa, where some hope the poor energy infrastructure in many countries will allow renewable energy technology to “leapfrog” over traditional fossil-fuel electricity plants, much as mobile phone technology bypassed fixed-line telephone systems in some areas.
Ms Andersen noted that concentrated solar power and other forms of renewable energy sources were too expensive to be built now without the sort of assistance being provided for the Ouarzazate complex. “But as the price goes down, this becomes a more and more viable option,” she said.
At the moment, Morocco imports 97 per cent of its energy needs and its national power grid relies on coal-fired steam plants and oil-fired combustion turbines, which emit a large amount of greenhouse gases.
The first phase of its Ouarzazate complex alone will help it avoid emitting 240,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, which is roughly equal to removing 80,000 cars from the road every year, according to the World Bank.
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