News from an old buddy.
In the world’s single-largest investment in solar technology, the oil-rich emirate of Abu Dhabi announced Wednesday it will spend $2 billion to jumpstart a home-grown photovoltaics industry. The cash will fund what is undoubtedly the planet’s best-financed startup, Masdar PV, which will build manufacturing facilities in Germany and Abu Dhabi to produce thin-film solar modules that can be used in rooftop solar systems or solar power plants.
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The gamble Masdar PV is taking is that it’s investing billions in an older but proven thin-film technology that may well be left in the dust by more exotic, cheaper and efficient technologies under development by a host of startups.
Masdar PV aims to have a gigawatt of annual production capacity in place by 2014. To get there, Geiger says the company has hired a management team that includes former top executives from First Solar and other thin-film industry veterans.
Looks like Lomborg\’s mistake was to be insufficiently optimistic. Things carry on like this we\’ll all be switching to solar within a decade on purely cost grounds and thus bye bye global warming as a problem.
And it\’s all being done purely for profit.
“…we’ll all be switching to solar within a decade…”
Those of us who live in Portugal, maybe. I doubt that solar will keep us warm in England in winter.
Neil, you beat me to it.
All very well in Abu Dhabi, but I wouldn’t like to be trying it in the West of Scotland.
And if the outcome is that we end up dependent on the bloody Arabs again – because, dammit, they have all the sunshine as well as all the oil – then it’s not really a solution, is it?
the oil-rich emirate of Abu Dhabi announced Wednesday it will spend $2 billion to jumpstart a home-grown photovoltaics industry.
Unfortunately, any foreign entity coming to work in this new industry will still be required by law sign up with a local “sponsor” to whom you must pay 7% of revenues in return for doing precisely nothing. This will go nowhere.