King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (K.A.CARE) has begun implementing a national project aimed at measuring the renewable energy sources in the Kingdom including solar, wind, geothermal energy, and waste-to-energy. The project will also work toward collecting wide-ranging terrestrial readings from different locations in the Kingdom.

The goal of the project is to establish a database that can be utilized in the implementation of renewable energy projects for power generation and water desalination as well as to benefit from the research aspects of the development of technologies and solutions appropriate for the Kingdom’s diverse regional climates.

“This project will enable many parties from the private sector, the government, universities and research institutes, which utilize and benefit from renewable energy sources in the Kingdom for generating power, desalinated water, and other applications such as cooling. The information is very important for the development of any project for exploitation of renewable energy,” Maher Alodan, head of research and development at K.A.CARE and in charge of the project, said.

As part of the project, a national atlas of renewable energy sources in Saudi Arabia will be prepared, which will be used by interested parties, such as universities and research centers as well as project developers. In addition, a number of monitoring stations will be established during coming months, which will include at least a hundred stations distributed accurately around all parts of the Kingdom. The stations will monitor all climate and weather information to scan and identify renewable energy resources in the country.

According to a statement issued Saturday by K.A.CARE, part of the collected information and data will be provided to interested researchers via a website in a smooth and easy way. The information includes radiation, the solar spectrum and wind speed in the Kingdom.

In this context, the project team explained that the assessment of renewable energy resources is a very important issue, especially as Saudi Arabia is targeting a long-term program. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the initial requirements — the most important one the absorption and understanding of the nature of potential renewable resources. The team has to find out the quality of solar radiation, although adapting it into solar power plant projects needs an inclusive study. This, the team said, is not an easy thing, as they must study many technical elements to facilitate the needs of developers of solar energy projects in a specific geographical location, such as identifying the quality of solar radiation. This requires studying the quality of solar projection and its power in addition to the impact of climatic and geographical factors such as dust, humidity, wind, soil, rust-causing factors, degree of tilt of the earth, abundance of water, and natural shade of mountains, which all affect power production.

The project will be implemented in cooperation with the National Laboratory for Renewable Energy and Battelle Memorial Institute, both in the United States, as well as many of the national authorities of the Kingdom.

In the same vein, Saudi Arabia ranked seventh in the world in 2012 in the list of 10 best places in clean energy worldwide, according to a list published yesterday by British newspaper The Guardian.

The Kingdom got this advanced rank for its intention to fully utilize renewable energy in the coming years. Recently, it revealed plans and projects to shift from the use of fossil fuels to clean energy.

Ghana topped the list through its intention to establish a solar power plant with a capacity of 155MW that was developed by a British company and is expected to provide many job opportunities.

The UK came second because of the “London Array” offshore wind farm, which cost 1.5 billion pounds.

Ireland came third in the world, through the wind fields that generate electric power, as it plans to invest 5 billion pounds in the construction of more than 700 turbines of pneumatic energy transferred through cables, while the US ended fourth in the list.