I saw a news item recently about a country that is planning a major new investment in solar energy technology. At first, I didn’t find the article particularly noteworthy – after all, a number of countries have begun to embrace alternative energy technologies in the face of rising concerns about fossil fuel use – but then I saw that the country in question was the United Arab Emirates.
The UAE, a country with the world’s fifth-largest petroleum reserves, investing in solar? It almost seemed like a joke, until I saw that the Arab nation plans to spend at least 350 million dollars on a 100-megawatt solar power plant, and could possibly build a plant as large as 500-megawatts.
Like the UAE, the United States is a country that has massive natural fossil fuel reserves (coal, in our case), and thus does not particularly need to invest in solar technology to meet its current energy needs. But investments in solar will certainly pay off in the long run, and could eventually provide many areas of our country with clean, abundant, and affordable energy. With all of the conflict and uncertainty in today’s Middle East, this is one area in which an Arab nation is setting a good example for us to follow.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Alternative Energy Technology, International Environmental News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
