Why Can’t We Go Solar?

Disclaimer-1:

Just to be clear, Solar PV is one of the best energy solutions for Kuwait right now and in the future. 

Disclaimer-2:

The KPC decided to cancel phase 2 of the Shagaya Solar park *sad noises*.

In a Nutshell: 

Watt: The measuring unit of the power you use.

Watt-hour: Take your light bulb and see the rating on the box, say it’s 60 W. This means that if you power on the lightbulb for 1 hour, then it’ll consume 60 Watt-hours. Now apply this concept on a national level and you have the nation’s demand for electricity per Watt-hour. 

Photovoltaic (PV): These are the cool looking solar panels that you see on rooftops. They come in different generations with different limitations and efficiencies. 

Efficiency (%): This is a calculation of how much of anything you will get over what you have put in. In our case, it’s how much power will be produced by a solar panel after the biggest amount of sunlight hits its surface. 

Long Story Short:

• PV has a low efficiency (Except Multi-junction PV),
• Our grid cannot handle depending only on Solar PV,
• Renewable energy is intermittent, 
• Dust and debris reduce PV power generation,
• It is really hard and inefficient to run a fully functional country-wide power grid with only renewable energy sources. 
• Countries that do that mostly have many many waterfalls and have multiple gas-powered generators on stand-by ready to kick in.
• Kuwait’s electricity demand was 44 TWh (a 44,000 GegaWatt-hour, 44 Million MegaWatt-hour) in 2015.
• This means that we will need a project 14 times the size of the current Phase 2 project of Shagaya. 

Long Story Long:

Alright, so this is my first blog post (like ever lol) so bear with me. 

Kuwait’s Energy Outlook-Snippet:

Kuwait consumes 44 TWh/year of power, 60% of it goes to power our homes and most of this 60% goes to our ACs. We power our generators mostly with oil and natural gas (Until The Shagaya Renewable Energy Park goes online in full force by 2035). The former is not nice because it’s just nasty. It produces more emissions than natural gas and it is not good for our generators in the long run.

FINALLY, we have wised up and started using Closed Cycle Gas Turbines. Which basically uses the heat produced by the generators to produce steam which in turn is used to power a steam turbine and produce more power and increases the plant’s efficiency. 

Solar Solar Solar

Solar Energy is an amazing source. It’s perfect. It’s there all the time. We have plenty of it, and no one is planning on turning off that big yellow thing in the sky any time soon, so why can’t we just use Solar Energy as our main source of Energy and save the planet? 

Efficiency

Well, it’s not that simple, unfortunately. When we are talking about Solar Energy most probably you will be thinking about Photovoltaics (PV) and these ones tend to have a pretty low efficiency rate.

The efficiency of a PV solar panel is 15% to 18% on average in western countries with the highest recorded efficiency for a commercial product is nearly at 23% in the lab (Under perfect environmental conditions).

However, Multi-junction solar cells are the most efficient, with a maximum efficiency record of 42.3% (Under perfect environmental conditions of course), but according to NREL in 2018 they cost around $300/Watt (The same price as the conventional ones in the 80s!!) while the utility-scale PV cells cost $1/Watt on average.

In a nutshell (again): Multi-junction PV cells are made up of multiple semiconductors (the stuff used to convert sunlight to power) made from different materials stacked on top of each other, each one captures part of the wave-lengths of sunlight hitting the whole cell, thus, it generates more power than the usual. 

It’s not always sunny in Farawniya

The sun doesn’t shine for 24 hours every day. Yes, we do use batteries to store the power generated during the day to operate our electronics at night, but the issue here is with the amount of sunlight we receive is not consistent due to the interruptions we usually get from dust and the very rare event of seeing clouds here (Yes, we all post that video of the grey sky, frickley windows, and a happy song in the background). 

Dust and Debris

Most common PV panels lose efficiency when their cells get covered by dirt or dust, which means that we have to keep cleaning them all the time to maintain production. Now imagine this on a large utility scale. 

Not-so-Smart Grids

Our Electricity grids are pretty old and they need to be renovated to be able to handle the nature of renewable energy in general. 

Primarily, electricity in our grids flow in one direction, from the power producer to our homes, which is not suitable for renewable energy, in the case of residential solar, since your home might be able to inject the extra power it doesn’t need into the grid. 

Secondly, renewable energy is intermittent as we’ve established earlier. So we will need to have emergency power sources ready to sub in the moment the energy produced via our solar panels go below the demand. (Don’t get me started on reactive power). Therefore, we need to give our grids the ability to communicate between the power users (us) and the generators, to know when to inject more or less power into the grid. 

Smart Grids

Smart Grids have multiple uses: 

• Bidirectional communication between the electronics used by the consumer (you) and the power stations, which allows for more efficient transmission and distribution of electricity.

• They are, again, bidirectional, which means that they accept a two way power movement in the distribution cables. 

• They also restore electricity faster in the case of power outages.

This way if the power goes down from a PV farm for example (due to dust or for any other reasons), a conventional power generator can kick up its production to cover the required demand.

Size Matters

Currently, Kuwait is building Phase 2 of the Shagaya Renewable Energy Park out of only PV Solar panels with a 1.5 GW capacity and it is forecasted to generate 3.1 TWh/Year, sooo with simple maths we will need to build a 14 times (approx.) bigger park in capacity, space, and the whole shebang, just to cover Kuwait’s current demand at face value, i.e. without accounting for the extra capacity needed to cover for the fluctuations in production. 

What about Wind?

Well, Wind would have been perfect for us, if we lived in a windy area, and I mean like REALLY windy, with no sandstorms. 

At the moment we are testing out wind energy in Al Shagaya, but it will take time to be sure whether it’s feasible on a big(ger) scale. However, I personally believe that we should test out off-shore wind, since the chances of a wind farm getting caught up in a sandstorm in the sea are a lot lower than on land. 

Finally

We have to accept that we will be using fossil fuels as an energy source for the next 10 years at least, so the concept of zero emissions power generation for Kuwait, using current technologies, is not feasible.

Except if we go nuclear, since it is literally the only source of consistent power with zero emissions out there, but more on that later.

References

Check out New Kuwait’s website, it has a cool feature that shows you the progress of each project they are currently working on.