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Renewable Energy in MENA Area to Double Next Year, Desertec Says
Anthony DiPaola, Bloomberg
March 07, 2014 | 0 Comments

DUBAI -- Clean energy assets in the Middle East and North Africa will more than double in capacity by the end of next year, the Dii GmbH industry association said.

Solar and wind generation capacity will rise to 3.9 gigawatts in 2015 from more than 1.5 gigawatts now, Paul van Son, chief executive officer of the Munich-based trade association known as Desertec, said in an interview in Dubai March 4.

Governments are looking to clean energy to meet rising demand for power and to conserve fossil fuels for export. Oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf plan to boost solar output, which will distributerenewable energy more evenly across the region, Van Son said. Most of the region’s green energy assets are wind plants in North Africa, he said.

“The demand is here,” Van Son said. “Production costs for power are lower than in Europe, where the supply-side trend is to higher cost.” Once supply is developed and power grids are connected, Europe and the MENA region will constitute a single, linked power market, he said.

The Middle East and North Africa will need more than $50 billion in investments by the end of the decade to add as much as 15,000 megawatts of solar-generating capacity, the Middle East Solar Industry Association and MEED Insight said in a report Jan. 20.

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/...-desertec-says

Promising News for Solar Fuels from Berkeley Lab Researchers at JCAP
March 07, 2014
Lynn Yarris

There’s promising news from the front on efforts to produce fuels through artificial photosynthesis. A new study by Berkeley Lab researchers at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) shows that nearly 90-percent of the electrons generated by a hybrid material designed to store solar energy in hydrogen are being stored in the target hydrogen molecules.

Gary Moore, a chemist and principal investigator with Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division, led an efficiency analysis study of a unique photocathode material he and his research group have developed for catalyzing the production of hydrogen fuel from sunlight. This material, a hybrid formed from interfacing the semiconductor gallium phosphide with a molecular hydrogen-producing cobaloxime catalyst, has the potential to address one of the major challenges in the use of artificial photosynthesis to make renewable solar fuels.

“Ultimately the renewable energy problem is really a storage problem,” Moore says. “Given the intermittent availability of sunlight, we need a way of using the sun all night long. Storing solar energy in the chemical bonds of a fuel also provides the large power densities that are essential to modern transport systems. We’ve shown that our approach of coupling the absorption of visible light with the production of hydrogen in a single material puts photoexcited electrons where we need them to be, stored in chemical bonds.”

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/science-sh...r-solar-fuels/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0307133631.htm