Saudi Arabia's superpowered sunshine dream
Saudi Arabia surprised observers earlier this year when it announced a massive renewables deal. But is it doable?
In March, Saudi Arabia and Japan's SoftBank signed a $200bn agreement for the construction of a whopping 200 gigawatts of solar power generation capacity, scheduled for completion in the kingdom by 2030. This would turn the country into the world's largest solar producer. The scale of the project is epic. Equivalent to two-thirds of all the existing solar worldwide, it's about 100 times larger than the next-biggest proposed development—in Australia. Projected output would more than double what the global photovoltaic (PV) industry supplied last year. The project would also overtake the original Saudi target of a far more modest 9.5GW of renewable energy by 2023, as outlined in the country's
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