Here comes the sun

Jun 20th 2024
The Economist

A photovoltaic cell is a very simple thing: a square piece of silicon typically 182 millimetres on each side and about a fifth of a millimetre thick, with thin wires on the front and an electrical contact on the back. Shine light on it, and an electric potential—a voltage—will build up across the silicon: hence “photovoltaic”, or PV. Run a circuit between the front and the back, and in direct sunlight that potential can provide about seven watts of electric power.

This year the world will make something like 70bn of these solar cells, the vast majority of them in China, and sandwich them between sheets of glass to make what the industry calls modules but most other people call panels: 60 to 72 cells at a time, typically, for most of the modules which end up on residential roofs, more for those destined for commercial plant. Those panels will provide power to family homes, to local electricity collectives, to specific industrial installations and to large electric grids; they will sit unnoticed on roofs, charmingly outside rural schools, controversially across pristine deserts, prosaically on the balconies of blocks of flats and in almost every other setting imaginable.

Once in place they will sit there for decades, making no noise, emitting no fumes, using no resources, costing almost nothing and generating power. It is the least obtrusive revolution imaginable. But it is a revolution nonetheless.

Over the course of 2023 the world’s solar cells, their panels currently covering less than 10,000 square kilometres, produced about 1,600 terawatt-hours of energy (a terawatt, or 1tw, is a trillion watts). That represented about 6% of the electricity generated world wide, and just over 1% of the world’s primary-energy use. That last figure sounds fairly marginal, though rather less so when you consider that the fossil fuels which provide most of the world’s primary energy are much less efficient. More than half the primary energy in coal and oil ends up as waste heat, rather than electricity or forward motion.

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https://www.omanobserver.om/pdos-transition-to-energy-development-oman-gets-nod/

PDO’s transition to Energy Development Oman gets nod

11/04/2020 Conrad Prabhu

Social media was abuzz with news over the weekend of an impending announcement by Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) – the biggest player in the Sultanate’s hydrocarbon sector by far – of its keenly awaited transition into a broad-based energy development holding company with an enlarged mandate to cover investments in, among other areas, renewable and alternative energy resources.

Energy Development Oman (PDO), the concept behind which was first unveiled by Managing Director Raoul Restucci (pictured) nearly three years ago, centres on a vision to reposition PDO from an essentially fossil fuels-based producer to a “fully fledged energy company”.

The strategy envisions PDO’s diversification into, among other areas, solar and alternative energy development, energy management, low-carbon technologies, oil and gas consultancy services, and water management. The Omani government is a 60 per cent shareholder in PDO, which accounts for a predominant share of the country’s oil and gas output

In an online address to company employees last week, Restucci outlined, among other things, the company’s strategy to weather the crisis unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the collapse in international oil prices. A notable part of the strategy, he said, is the establishment of Energy Development Oman designed to diversify the company’s activities and thereby reduce its vulnerability to upheavals of the kind that the global Oil & Gas industry is currently undergoing.

Plans for the creation of EDO now have the “full endorsement” of the Omani government, said the Managing Director. “What that means is twofold: One, EDO will be a holding company of PDO and a number of investments. For PDO, it will enable us to corporatise the entity and thus enable us to secure the funding and resources which the government at the moment is securing for us at very high cost. We will be able to deconsolidate that debt and secure it at substantially more attractive terms; Second, EDO is also about to transition as well. We have a number of businesses, a number of investments that are very keen to partner with us.”

In a statement to the Observer, PDO noted: “We are progressing plans aimed at corporatising PDO and developing renewable energy opportunities in close coordination with the Government and enabled by the establishment of Energy Development Oman (EDO).“

In recent years, PDO has embarked on a number of initiatives that champion energy efficiency in oilfield operations, use of renewables and low-carbon emission technologies, and environmental sustainability.

PDO is a global pioneer in the use of solar energy to generate steam necessary for its Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) operations. To this end, PDO is collaborating with GlassPoint Solar in the implementation of a 1-gigawatt Miraah project that harnesses solar energy to produce heavy oil from the Amal oilfield instead of natural gas for steam generation.

Last year, the company brought into operation its maiden utility-scale solar PV project — a 100-MW installation at Amin in the southern part of its concession — under a long-term Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) reached with investors in the Independent Power Project (IPP).

Furthermore, PDO is exploring avenues for investment in solar and wind resources for power generation and water desalination, power to ‘X’, solar to hydrogen, and other opportunities. The company has also expressed an interest in bidding for large-scale solar power schemes procured by state-run Oman Power and Water Procurement Company (OPWP).