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.

 

 

Nuclear Booms in Asia as New Reactor Ideas Flourish in U.S.

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By Llewellyn King

The nuclear electric industry has sustained some mighty blows in the United States and Western Europe in recent years. It might be reeling, but it is not out and it is not going down for the count. Taken globally, things are good.

The need to curb carbon in the air, to service a growing world population and the surging cities are impelling nuclear forward. At the annual summit meeting of the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council (NIC) in Washington, this future was laid out with passion: Nuclear power is experiencing a growth spurt but not in the United States and Western Europe, except for Britain.

Nuclear demand is high where air pollution is at its worst and where economic activity is fast and furious — in Asia generally, and in China and India in particular.

Vijay Sazawal, president of IAEC Consulting, told the NIC meeting that India would be adding two reactors a year to its nuclear fleet moving forward. China and India are building half of the 60 new reactors under construction worldwide, according to Andrew Paterson of Verdigris Capital Group, which studies nuclear.

Paterson predicted world electricity demand will double by 2050 and that most of the demand would come from the megacities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. He said, “By 2030, China will have 15 megacities (10 million or more people) and 150 cities with more than 1 million people.”

Wind and solar energy, the other carbon-free electricity sources, also will grow dramatically but will be constrained by their land needs. Big cities are ill-suited to roof-mounted solar, and windmills require large acreages of open land not found near megacities.

In the United States, the shadow of the Westinghouse bankruptcy is passing over the nuclear community. How could a once-proud and dominant company get its sums so wrong that it has been forced into bankruptcy? The collapse of the company — which was building two plants with four reactors in South Carolina and Georgia, four reactors in China, and was engaged in projects in the United Kingdom and India — will be studied in business schools for generations to come. Bad management, not bad nuclear, has brought Westinghouse and its parent Toshiba to its knees.

But nuclear believers are undaunted. Nuclear advocates have a kind of religious commitment to their technology, to their science and to the engineering that turns the science into power plants.

I have been writing about nuclear since 1970, and I have featured it on my television program, “White House Chronicle,” for more than 20 years. I can attest that there is something special in the passion of nuclear people for nuclear power. They have fervor wrapped in a passion for kind of energy utopia. They believe in the great gift that nuclear offers a populous world: a huge volume of electricity.

The kernel here, the core belief, the holy grail of nuclear is wrapped up in “energy density”: how a small amount of nuclear material can produce a giant amount of electricity in a plant that has few moving parts, aside from the conventional steam turbine. As designs have evolved and plants have become “passive” in their safety systems, the things that can go wrong have been largely eliminated.

To understand energy density think this way: The average wind turbine you see along the highway turns out 2 megawatts of electricity when there is wind, a trifling amount compared to the 1,600 megawatts a new nuclear plant produces continuously — and probably will produce for 100 years before it is retired.

Asia, choking on air pollution and with huge growth, needs nuclear. America is not gasping for new generation: demand is static and there is a natural gas glut. Also, there is land aplenty for solar and wind to be installed.

But U.S. nuclear creativity, even genius, will not rest. The United States is on the frontier, pioneering a generation of wholly new reactor concepts, mostly for small modular reactors and even big new reactors, which may first be built in China and India but, like so much else, will be “thought up in America.”

At nuclear conclaves like the NIC meeting, there is sadness that the U.S. market is stagnant. But there is incandescent hope for the future.

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

Bad Energy Vibes from Obama, Odd Ones from McCain

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Memo To Sen. Barack Obama: Beware of your friends and their opinions.

For example, Rep. Edward Markey was on a Sunday talk show allegedly defending your position on offshore drilling. But, in fact, the Massachusetts Democrat was defending his own long-held and irrelevant views. You just had an epiphany on campaign finance. Now, you need to have one on energy. At this point, the world needs oil and will need it for many decades. True, the United States will not get any new oil from the outer continental shelf for 10 years, and it will only account for about 4 percent of our needs as long as it lasts. But even that is essential.

Memo To The Friends Of Sen. John McCain: Just when you thought your candidate had settled down to be George W. Bush Lite, he up and proved that old mavericks cannot change their ways. McCain split the difference on oil by reversing himself on outer continental shelf drilling and remaining adamant on not drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). This put Tom Ridge, the former homeland security chief, on the spot on a Sunday talk show. Ridge simply could not explain the inconsistency of McCain, whose presidential bid he supports.

No matter what you believe should be done, the irrefutable fact is that the world is in a terrible energy bind–and all the indications are that the world energy situation may get worse.

Politicians of the left want to believe that there are technologies ready to come on line, and they are being squeezed out by old-line energy companies. They place their faith in what are referred loosely as “alternatives,” which include solar, wind and geothermal power. These they see as being the equivalent of low-impact aerobics. Painless and environmentally neutral. These politicians oppose the burning of coal and have no coherent policy on oil and gas. They choose to believe that the current high price of oil is a combination of oil company greed, Wall Street speculation, and the Bush administration’s appeasement of the Saudi royal family.

Conservative politicians have as much problem facing reality as their liberal colleagues. They have an inordinate faith that current off-limits drilling areas, both in the ocean and on land, will produce untold quantities of energy for the United States. They have considerable faith in new technologies that will clean up coal, find oil at ever-greater depths, and exploit gas hydrates on the ocean floor. They also believe that oil shale in the West, abandoned in the 1970s because of the environmental consequences of mining and the shortage of water, will replace Saudi Arabia.

One thing the left and the right do agree on is that plug-in hybrid vehicles are going to help a lot. The theory is that they will make a big dent in the 20 million barrels of oil that the United States gulps down every day; that is 10,000 gallons of gasoline every second, according to John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Company.

There is an energy establishment, and it is of one mind on energy challenges. This is the thrust of its thinking:

l Energy conservation is essential

l The outer continental shelf should be explored aggressively, along with federal lands

l ANWR should be drilled immediately, and a natural gas pipeline from Alaska should have priority

l Nuclear power is the best substitute for the coal now being burned and to replace geriatric plant

l Coal gasification is the best way to burn coal

l Wind power works and should be encouraged; in particular, storing wind energy as compressed air needs research

l Liquefied natural gas imports need to be boosted

l The search for new technologies needs to be relentless

l Energy producers, from oil companies to wind farms to electric utilities, need consistency in public policy

The unsaid addendum to the establishment thinking is that Obama needs to get some energy advisers who have a solid purchase on the Earth, and that McCain needs to listen to his advisers. In 1974, governments fell like ninepins as the global economy was battered by high energy prices. The battering next time may be much worse.