Empire of the Sun

President and CEO of Enviromena Power Systems, Sami Khoreibi, discusses his company's role in creating the Middle East's largest solar plant and paving the way for a regional solar industry.

This month, the 10MW solar power plant at Masdar City - the biggest of its kind in the Middle East - will flick silently into action, as it not only starts providing the power required to build the Masdar City development, but all excess production will go back into the main grid, providing a little clean energy for every home across Abu Dhabi.

It's an exciting time for the Emirate, Masdar and, in particular, for Enviromena. The company was incorporated in October 2007 inspired by and in direct response to the Masdar Initiative.

Originally just four founder members, we have now grown the company to 25 employees in a very short time. And that should tell you all you need to know about the potential we see in solar.

There's huge interest in sustainability and renewables right now, especially after President Obama announced his green jobs goal. The number of delegates that attended the World Future Energy Summit in January demonstrates the height of interest that there is in the subject, Abu Dhabi and the region on the whole.

The Abu Dhabi government has set the Emirate a goal of 7% clean energy by 2020. In real terms, that means between 1 and 1.5GW of renewables. In this environment, that means solar.

Each region needs to play to its own clean energy strengths. For some countries that means wind; for others, it may mean a combination of various sources. In the UAE and GCC, we only have sun but it is so consistent that it makes solar the obvious choice. There's a huge amount of arid land and high solar resource - access to grid connection points - making the region tremendous for solar.

Solar is still very much in its infancy in the region and in the local marketplace but the potential is there for all to see. Quite simply, there's an energy shortage and we have the optimum conditions to become a solar tech leader. Enviromena is trying to set an example and that is why our involvement with the Masdar plant has been so important.

The plant takes root

Masdar provided us with the 212,000m² area required for the 10MW plant. The largest single components there are the modules themselves and we were absolutely unwavering on our commitment to use only the best technologies available.

Therefore, we turned to the two largest suppliers. Half of the plant employs modules by Suntech, a Chinese company that is the largest provider of crystalline technology; the other half utilises Thin Film semiconductor photovoltaic modules from a US energy company called Firstsolar.

We decided to use two types of modules as this project is the first of its kind and we wanted to both showcase the two technologies and see which one works best in these conditions. Each has its pros and cons; Thin Film, for example, is less affected by extreme heat but modules are larger and require around 50% more space.

Using renewable energies is very much like having a farm with different crops available. Even within solar, there are different technologies available and it could well be that using a variety of these provides best results throughout different times or conditions. Concentrated, photovoltaic, concentrated photovoltaic...there are a lot of options.

Part of our mandate was to foster local growth and that is exactly what we did with the Enviromena design team. As a new industry, there was little existing knowledge in Abu Dhabi, so we brought in experienced experts and took on local talent to learn from them - we successfully built Abu Dhabi's first solar design team.

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