The Egyptian Electricity Ministry has unveiled plans to build a new $700m 100MW solar power plant between 2012 and 2017 that should further establish the country as one of the leading developers of utility-scale solar plants.

According to reports in the local Al-Ahram newspaper, the solar power project at Kom Ombo, near the Aswan High Dam hydro-electric plant, will be financed by a number of international institutions, including the African Development Fund and the World Bank. Additional finance is also expected to be provided through the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) carbon offsetting scheme.

The project is part of a five-year plan running from 2012-2017 designed to establish the Egypt as one of the top generators of solar energy in North Africa, electricity ministry undersecretary Aktham Abou el-Ella told news agency Reuters.

The project will be the nation’s second large scale solar power project following the country’s first solar plant at El-Koraymat, south of Cairo, which is expected to be finished later this year and will produce 20MW of solar power alongside 120MW of conventional natural gas power.

The vast majority of Egypt’s power is currently provided by natural gas-fired power stations, with a small percentage coming from large scale hydroelectric plants on the Nile delta.

However, the country’s government has pledged to generate 20 per cent of its power from renewable sources by 2020, which it hopes to achieve largely through wind and solar expansion. It is also eyeing the potential to export solar energy to southern Europe as part of the high profile Desertec initiative.

Northern Africa has been touted as a potential hub for solar energy generation given its low levels of rain and year-round sun, but uptake of the technology has been slow, largely because of high capital costs.

Egypt will need to dramatically accelerate the rate at which it deploys solar technologies if it is to meet its ambitious renewable energy targets. Electricity
generation is currently growing at a rates of seven to eight per cent a year, due to a growing economy and increasing use of air conditioning units, and a government-sponsored report last year estimated the country will need to have at least 1GW of solar capacity alongside 7.2GW of wind capacity to meet its 2020 renewables target while satisfying the growing demand for power.

The government also has a long way to go to meet its wind energy target. There has been large scale wind farm development along Egypt’s eastern Red Sea coast, but even with huge new wind farms at Zafarana and Hurghada having recently come online the country’s total installed capacity currently stands at just 430 MW.

However, plenty of new projects are in the pipeline and last month the World Bank awarded Egypt a $220m loan to support the Wind Power Development Project, which aims to develop the infrastructure and business models needed to scale up wind power in the country.

The initiative will include the funding of new transmission lines to connect Egypt’s largest wind farm, the 250MW Gabal el-Zait project, to the national grid.

“Some of the world’s best wind power resources are in Egypt, especially in the areas of the Gulf of Suez, where at least 7.2GW could be potentially developed by 2022, with further 3GW on the west and east banks of the Nile,” the World Bank said in a statement at the time. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

The era of personalized energy systems — in which individual homes and small businesses produce their own energy for heating, cooling and powering cars — took another step toward reality today as scientists reported discovery of a powerful new catalyst that is a key element in such a system. They described the advance, which could help free homes and businesses from dependence on the electric company and the corner gasoline station, at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, being held here this week.

“Our goal is to make each home its own power station,” said study leader Daniel Nocera, Ph.D. “We’re working toward development of ‘personalized’ energy units that can be manufactured, distributed and installed inexpensively. There certainly are major obstacles to be overcome — existing fuel cells and solar cells must be improved, for instance. Nevertheless, one can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic system.”

Such a system would consist of rooftop solar energy panels to produce electricity for heating, cooking, lighting, and to charge the batteries on the homeowners’ electric cars. Surplus electricity would go to an “electrolyzer,” a device that breaks down ordinary water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen. Both would be stored in tanks. In the dark of night, when the solar panels cease production, the system would shift gears, feeding the stored hydrogen and oxygen into a fuel cell that produces electricity (and clean drinking water as a byproduct). Such a system would produce clean electricity 24 hours a day, seven days a week — even when the sun isn’t shining.

Nocera’s report focused on the electrolyzer, which needs catalysts — materials that jumpstart chemical reactions like the ones that break water up into hydrogen and oxygen. He is with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. Good catalysts already are available for the part of the electrolyzer that produces hydrogen. Lacking, however, have been inexpensive, long-lasting catalysts for the production of oxygen. The new catalyst fills that gap and boosts oxygen production by 200-fold. It eliminates the need for expensive platinum catalysts and potentially toxic chemicals used in making them.

The new catalyst has been licensed to Sun Catalytix, which envisions developing safe, super-efficient versions of the electrolyzer, suitable for homes and small businesses, within two years.

The National Science Foundation and the Chesonis Family Foundation provided funding for this study. Nocera did the research with post-doctoral researcher Mircea Dinca and doctoral candidate Yogesh Surendranath. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency has recently awarded the team with a grant, which it plans to use to search for related compounds that can further increase the efficiency of its electrolyzer technology. The team hopes that nickel-borate belongs to a family of compounds that can be optimized for super-efficient, long-term energy storage technologies.– by The American Chemical Society. A non-profit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 161,000 members, ACS is the world’s largest scientific society.

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