According to Arabian Business, Kuwait is raising the bar and aims to generate 10 percent of its electricity from sustainable sources by 2020. All I have to say is it’s about time. With our sunny cloudless skies all year round, solar energy is the way to go. Next stop should be replacing all the heavily polluting buses with electric running ones and it should be pretty easy to do. [Link]
30 replies on “Clean energy coming to Kuwait”
Bout time
good idea there should be more posts about this its a shame ppl dont care about their sarroundings
“Kuwait subsidizes electricity for more than 1 million Kuwaiti citizens and about 2.5 million expatriates. They pay 2 fils (7 US cents) a kilowatt-hour compared with more than 35 fils a kilowatt-hour for production”
That is the problem. We can dream about solar, wind and whatever but nothing will change as long as we pay practically nothing for electricity.
Nobody asks about the energy efficiency of air conditioners when installing new ones, but only about their cooling power. If the problem is wealth distribution, then give people cash to spend freely on anything instead of subsidizing electricity (or water, or petrol) because people will waste it.
Totally agree. People got to pay for what they consume. Than only there will be efficiency in usage.
Or they can simply have the decency to conserve energy instead of waste it…
2020 will be complete. I say complete bull. For God sake kuwait didn’t complete any of the projects it announced. It will take more like 2080 until completion.
But how much of that sustainable power will be used to generate the energy needed to power those ridiculously wasteful fairy lights people drape over their houses every time a ‘child is born’…..I’m all for celebration, but come one please.
Barrak you brought up a good point. When I am in Kuwait I don’t think about saving energy or gas. But on the other hand for my apartment in Lebanon, every purchase I made I considered my electric bill. I wanted an electric oven but ended up with gas, Instead of two large AC’s I got 4 smaller ones. TVs? LED’s cuz they consume less energy. Mac Pro for my server? Nope went with the Mac Mini. Car? Don’t have one but if I did get one it would be a 2liter or less.
Now somebody should come up with a way to turn sandstorms into usable energy.
By 2020? Do they realize how close this is?
We wanted to increase oil production by 2020 and make the environmental impact of refining a little less. This was back in 2000! Because we failed to meet major milestones, we have simply made it into a 2030 plan… Clever.
How do you think we’ll do with a new energy source, if we’re this ineffective with one we’ve been working with for over 70 years?
that would be great
this is something that should have been done not even yesterday, it should have been there since the beginning of time… sun has always been there… but no body is interested to invest in such a sustainable energy source… why pay the money when you get the fuel for free? that is the mentality in Kuwait…
I don’t understand why you put a picture of a nuclear power plant as the way to go for clean energy. If you are all aware of what happened in Japan, you would definitely think twice before you even consider such a solution. Based of the size of Kuwait, it would endanger practically everyone when a leak would occur. Also considering our weather, it would be a stupid solution to go for. Imagine breathing in radioactive particles everyday. Imagine deformed childrens and loss of hair.
So any green energy should involve study of the climate and environment. So based on the weather and location of Kuwait, I think it is logical to opt for Solar or Wind energy as a means for electricity generation.
That’s and oil powered plant not a nuclear power plant.
Did you read the source? It happens to have the same picture in the original article.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Oil production is not much cleaner than coal. Nuclear, for all its faults, is incredibly safe and surprisingly clean. Newer plants are not susceptible to major catastrophic failures. Fukushima was really old. I don’t think i’ve heard of a major problem coming out of France’s nuclear power plants (which supply 70% of their power).
We would have to worry about nuclear waste disposal, which would be an issue.
I really think that our oil refineries, power plants and desalination facilities have caused more pollution and respiratory/cancer problems than would ever be cause by nuclear. It would be hard to prove, but it does seem plausible to me.
I do agree that we need to really invest heavily in solar. It would be almost impossible to get anything more than %10 of our energy production to be solar anytime in the near future, but that’s still better than nothing.
Hyperbolic cooling towers are used in several different industrial applications, not just nuclear power plants. The biggest problem with nuclear power is that the general public knows practically nothing about it! Most would rather get their information from a movie or TV show than actually study up on it.
I blame the Simpsons. Seriously.
Another disheartening point made in the article is that the guy in charge claims that we need more studies. We already have those. KISR and a lot of other groups have spent countless hours and millions of dinars trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. We can share the work of Abu Dhabi and Masdar. The ideas are out there and they just need to be implemented. No more delays.
My previous thoughts on solar in Kuwait and what I want to happen by 2030: https://rekuwait.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/kuwait-2030-solar-city/
I also have to comment on the people who want to believe that the delay is the governments fault. I don’t think its that simple. The problem is that people are simply unwilling to sacrifice their quality of life. They demand more benefits and fewer costs. The government is simply trying to please everyone.
I’ve been to countless meetings trying to get sustainable ideas and technologies implemented in Kuwait, at government institutions, big companies and small ones. They all acknowledge the critical situation we are in but the answer is always the same: We can’t do this because electricity is so cheap and this technology/product can’t compete in the market. Meaning electricity is so cheap, people won’t bother installing free solar panels, or smarter thermostats, or even efficient light bulbs. It doesn’t make economic sense to consumers even though all this wastefulness is causing summer blackouts and is an enormous burden on the government budget.
If you want to really blame someone, blame us all for not wanting to pay more for electricity, water and petrol. The government is just enabling us to live that way.
Basic supply and demand 😛 There’s so much easily obtainable electricity there’s no demand for it. The govt. institutions responsible for subsidies could always stop subsidizing and put in their budget to this instead but there would be riots in the street lol
True, but what if instead of the subsidies, they just give people a check to spend on whatever they want.
I’d pay a 1000KD electricity bill but get a 1000KD check. I’d invest in solar, better HVAC, reduced consumption and my bill goes down to 500KD, but I still get that 1000KD check. See? That’s incentivizing efficiency instead of rewarding waste.
Don’t forget they subsidize foreigners to, it would open the system to a lot of abuse if the foreigners got the check, or basically be a tax for them if it didn’t.
Or you could go around putting foreigners who don’t use too much electricity on your bill and collecting their checks 😛
It’s not Kuwait unless you find a way to play the system!
Totally agree, but how come no country on Earth so far has implemented solar energy on a large scale? I think it gets to do with the associated maintenance cost. One can say, however, that at least we should use the solar energy here in Kuwait as a backup during summer time.
By the way, Regarding your last point, I believe the main show-stopper ro raise the electricity charges is the parliament itself who’s obsessed with the idea of “Don’t put more on the people’s shoulders” thingi…
Regards,
Solar has to compete with fossil fuels. Right now the costs for installing and running solar are still higher, but with some help from governments and if oil keeps getting more expensive, then it won’t be long before it’s feasible at a much larger scale. China is already subsidizing PV like crazy and that’s driving down costs.
Solar panels would not last in Kuwait due to the sand. Kuwait would be better off using the oil they have and inserting filtration system. The buses would be better if they would just implement emission tests instead of som guy standing their looking at the tail pipe.
There’s sand on Mars too but the rovers use solar panels and have been a huge success. This is such a lazy, mindless excuse. Don’t like PV? There’s concentrated solar power. There’s dust repellant glass and automated cleaning systems. It’s a challenge, but one that has already been overcome and proven to work.
Sandstorms would block a lot of the sun, but they don’t last forever. Same with clouds, but we don’t have those.
Filtration system? What? How is that even relevant?
Let’s just switch the lights off…..
if u read about sustainable energy, especially solar energy, you will find that the concept is so astonishing. however in real life, many squared kilometers must be covered by solar panels and maintained plus there must be a way to store this energy to supply it at night. i agree, as a concept, sustainable energy is awesome however the technology to harness that energy and use it commercially simply doesn’t exist yet.
what I’m trying to say that its not about time that Kuwait starts to use sustainable energy because its simply inefficient and costly for it
thank you
If you keep reading about solar than you’ll know that what people are expecting is not to completely supplant the fossil fuel industry, but to supplement it. We’re looking for maybe %5 or %10 percent, which is still asking a lot. The idea is that it would help during the peak hours, which for Kuwait is midday in the summer, when all the ACs are running non stop. The sun, luckily, is shining during that time so solar makes a lot of sense for that peak load time.
Many squared kilometers? Seriously? Even the biggest solar farms are no more than a few thousand square meters. Space isn’t a problem.
Maintenance is an issue (wasting water to clean the glass reflectors/PV panels) and so is the initial cost. But storing the energy for night use isn’t, since the electric load at night is much less than during the day and we’ll still have our old natural gas power plants.
Awesome I thought about this Idea back then when I was 9 years old