White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Morocco: A ‘Destination’ for Renewable Energy under a New Kind of Sun King

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The Sahara has a lot of land and a lot of sun, making it an appealing place to site massive solar generating stations, and the Kingdom of Morocco is doing just that.

Add substantial wind resources inland and on the coast and Morocco looks set to fulfill its declared intention of not only satisfying its own demands, but also becoming a regional exporter to North Africa and Europe.

It has a total installed generating capacity of about 11,000 MW, 4,030 MW of which is renewables. An additional 4,516 MW of renewables is under construction or planned.

King Mohammed VI, who has ruled the country for 23 years, has been a strong advocate for solar and other renewables. He is, you might say, a new kind of sun king.

The North African country hopes that it will inspire many countries to switch from fossil fuels to renewables. Leila Benali, the dynamic minister of energy transition and sustainable development, told me in an interview on Zoom that she wants Morocco to be “a destination for renewable energy.”

In due course, according to Benali, Morocco could export more of  its power from renewables to Spain, Portugal, and even the United Kingdom. Currently, there are two electricity interconnections with Europe and a third is planned. The capacity of the interconnections is 1,400 MW and power flows both ways, depending on generating and market conditions in Europe and M0rocco. “Sometimes we are the only African country importing a commodity,” Benali joked.

If Morocco is to serve the UK, an additional interconnection would be needed, she said. Morocco already is interconnected to Algeria, Egypt, and Libya.

Once completed, the Noor Ouarzazate complex will be one of the largest solar power generating facilities in the world, covering more than 6,000 acres of desert. At present, the complex consists of three separate but co-located power stations, known as Noor I (160 MW), Noor II (200 MW), and Noor III (150 MW). A fourth station, Noor IV (72 MW), is planned.

The Moroccans are championing concentrated solar power (CSP), which has largely fallen by the way in the United States and Europe as photovoltaic (PV) cells have become very inexpensive. But CSP’s great advantage is that it has the ability to store energy and, therefore, to extend the availability of power. Noor I has 3 hours of storage capacity, Noor II and III have 7 hours each.

In the aftermath of the energy crisis of 1973, CSP technology held out major promise in the United States. Mirrors concentrate heat from these collectors to a boiler which heats water, for example, to 550 degrees Centigrade. The resulting steam generates the electricity through a turbine.

Rather than contributing to the infamous “duck curve,” where too much power is generated during the day and none during peak hours early in the morning and after the sun sets at night, CSP can cover those peaks. Surplus heat is stored in molten salt and used when needed either for electricity generation or other purposes. Benali told me she hopes that stored solar heat can be used for hydrogen production or desalination.

There have been a number of successful CSP installations in the United States, the largest of which is the 250 MW Solana plant in Gila Bend, Arizona. It has operated since 2013 on the APS system. CSP technology is also used in Israel, Spain, and other hot, sunny countries.

CSP has two downsides, cost and water availability, but abundant sunshine moderates the cost. You must build two systems: the collectors and the generator. By contrast, PV produces electricity directly. In a CSP plant, as with any other thermal power plant, water is needed for cooling and to wash down the collectors. The Noor facility is pumping water from a reservoir to meet its needs.

There are two CSP technologies and Morocco is employing both of them. One uses parabolic mirrors to direct the heat onto a pipe which carries a conduction fluid to the power plant. The other is the so-called power tower system. With this, sun-following mirrors, called heliostats, direct the sun to a collector at the top of a tower. Noor I and II are using parabolic collectors, and Noor 3 is using heliostats surrounding a tower which rises more than 800 feet.

Noor IV will be different: It will employ conventional PV cells. Benali told me, “We are ecumenical about renewable technology.”

She is proud of the huge projects as well as localized ones, including rooftop solar. She said the Moroccan administration is committed to bringing electricity to 100 percent of the population, from 99.4 percent today. The administration, she said, wants “every school, mosque, and home to have electricity” and if the last-mile cost is too high, they will employ microgrids.

According to Benali’s office, the capital cost of the solar projects has reached $5.2 billion. The ministry emphasized that Noor is far from the only development. It stated that 52 renewable projects are in operation, and 59 are under construction or planned.

Benali took office in October 2021, after a distinguished international career that included working for Schlumberger, Aramco, and Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

She has a splendid academic resume – holding degrees in engineering, economics, and political science — and a splendid sense of humor. When I asked her how she learned her flawless English, she told me she watched MTV as a child. The characters on her favorite show, “Beavis and Butt-Head,” never spoke with such easy articulateness.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on Aug. 1, 2022.

 

 

Disruptive Technology Hits Electric Industry

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If you are reading this by electric light, you are connected to the electric grid Unless, that is, you are one of an infinitesimal number of home owners who installed solar panels.
 
The penetration of solar panels may be statistically insignificant today, but to the electric industry these panels, and other self-generating schemes, are like dry rot: a threat to the whole edifice.
 
It is not just those panels that are beginning to disrupt the electrical grid, but the whole panoply of alternative technology; wind, geothermal heat, micro-hydro turbines and scattered natural gas turbines all fit into a new category of electric generation known as “distributed generation.”
 
The change is so threatening to the investor-owned electric utilities and their not-for-profit colleagues in the public power sector that it has begun to dominate discussions on the Web and wherever utility executives gather.
 
Early this year the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), which represents the investor-owned utilities that provide 70 percent of U.S. electricity, issued a white paper discussing the disruptive changes that are beginning to threaten the old electric paradigm. The theme of change also dominated the EEI annual convention in San Francisco earlier this month, with CEOs talking about a “new business model,” although they were hard put to say what this will be.
 
The root cause of the problem is that the new entrants into generating treat the grid as kind of open marriage: there when it suits them. A home owner, might be self-sufficient in electricity, and even generate enough to sell a small portion back, to the grid 90 percent of the time; but during prolonged bad weather, or if the home system is down for maintenance, that home owner expects to flip a switch and go back on the grid. The local utility, all the while, has been standing by hoping to sell that home owner a few watts until the home system returns to power.
 
This applies even more so to large users of electricity, including factories and big retailers. Many of the factory customers generate nearly all of their own electricity already and big retailers are getting in the game. Walmart is covering its store roofs with solar cells. McDonalds has eyed self-generating for years, but not without the comforting assurance that the grid will always be there.
 
All of this distorts the financial as well as the physical infrastructure of the utility industry and produces social problems as well. Ted Craver, CEO of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, told the EEI conference that as California is “ground zero” for rooftop solar, you have to ask “are you creating a system of those who have means for self- generating and shifting the burden to the have-nots? It is a social fairness question.”
 
The system is also skewed, Craver noted, by subsidies for alternative generation. He called for a flexible system that allows for these new realities.
 
Another threat, according to Tom Fanning, CEO of the giant Southern Company, comes to the ability of utilities — one of the most capital-intensive industries is the world– to raise money. “Our industry raises about $90 billion a year and we need policies that support that,” he said.
 
There are other problems facing the electricity industry, which are cataloged in an amusing and readable book by economist Steven Mitnick, “Lines Down.” While Mitnick is more optimistic about the future of the grid than many, he says it needs fixing. It has been starved of investment and needs upgrading, particularly hardening against the storm outages that are standard in America but not in Europe, Japan and South Korea.
 
The future of the grid is not in the hands of the utilities alone, but also the regulators, federal and state, and politicians. That means that the new paradigm may be a long time in coming, while another aspect of the U.S. infrastructure deteriorates. — For the Hearst New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cautious Obama is Hurting Future Oil and Electricity Supply

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From somewhere–inside the White House or the Department of Energy–President Obama is getting some pretty awful advice. It’s bad enough that he’s been persuaded that there’s a Nirvana Land of windmills and sunbeams in the future of electricity. But much more gravely in halting drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, he’s committing a fearsome folly.


If exploration and drilling in the Gulf doesn’t resume and gets caught up in punitive new rules, Obama, or his successor, will find the price of gasoline high (probably more than $5 a gallon) and military action against Iran will be proscribed.


It goes like this: After 18 months the supply of replacement oil from the Gulf dries up, due to the normal decline in production from old wells. Very soon, this loss exceeds 1 million barrels a day and begins to increase the world oil price,


World oil production today is 86.5 million barrels per day; of this, the United States gulps down an amazing 20 million barrels per day. This delicate balance, helped by the global recession, keeps the price bouncing between $70 and $80 per barrel.


Worst case is not only do we lose production in the Gulf, but any global upset–such as military action in Iran–will stress this oil production-demand balance further. Result: price rises. Political solution: none.


The folly of the Obama action is that every new hole drilled in deep water is going to be safer-than-safe.


There’s a well-known pattern: Disasters produce an aftermath of safety. The nuclear industry thought it was safe before the Three Mile Island meltdown, but it went back to the drawing board and produced new institutions for safety monitoring and study, as well as revised the very idea of defense in-depth.


The Obama caution is the danger, not the possibility of another spill.


The second energy disaster in the making is with electricity. The Obama administration has signed on to a vague idea, pushed by environmentalists and post-industrial schemers: It goes by the appropriately loose title of “alternative energy.”


In real-world terms, alternative energy can be narrowed to some solar

and wind. In fact, the only mature technology is wind. It works fine when the wind is blowing. The heat wave in the Eastern states in the past week makes the point: The wind doesn’t blow when it’s most needed.


There’s nothing wrong with wind, except that its most passionate advocates often favor it not for its own sake but for what it is not: nuclear power. Paranoia over nuclear power–always the first choice of the world’s utilities, if all things are equal–is a part of the cultural-political landscape in America.


Faced with this, the Obama administration has saddled up two horses and invited the nuclear industry to ride both as they diverge. It has thrown away the $11 billion spent on the first national nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, even as it has offered loan guarantees for new reactors.


Coming down the pike is a surge, a really huge surge, in electricity demand as plug-in hybrid cars and pure electric cars are deployed.


The plan–if you can call it that–is that the load of new uses will be spread by “smart meters” on the “smart grid,” and this will direct or coerce consumers to charge their cars in the middle of the night.


Fat chance. If consumers were that financially or morally conscious, they’d long since have cut their electric loads and driven smaller cars.


Want to be politically unpopular? Start telling people when they can refuel their cars. That’s known around the Tea Party circuit and elsewhere as government intervention.

Do you take yours with sugar? –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate