What’s most interesting about the Saudi Arabia is not the size of the total country goal – but let’s be really emotionally honest: 200GW is huge! It is the largest number associated with solar power globally. Both China and India have triple digit GW of solar goals, but neither are 200GW – and, both of those countries have more than a billion people…Saudi Arabia has 32 million.

What is most interest are two things though….1. Local manufacturing and 2. What are they doing with the huge scale?

SOURCE: What’s is most interesting is the vision and the way Saudi Arabia is going about it. Two factors that intrigue me – 1. Saudi Arabia is requiring local manufacturing, research, technology, etc. That means factories to supply these panels/inverters/racking are going to be built strategically to feed the kingdom. The world’s largest solar panel factories (ingot, wafers, cell, panel assembly) make 1-10GW of material per year. That means, the world’s largest factories would take twenty years to supply the country. This means significant capacity will be built in the country. This will be amazing. and 2. The country will be producing more electricity from 200GW of solar power than the whole of the country uses from all sources. What the hell are they going to do with that extra electricity? They are going to create a regional power network and sell their excess kWh to hydrogen generation facilities or other country.

Saudi Arabia has vision – that excites me – that might change the world.

Sign up for a weekly digest of solar industry news, delivered to your inbox every Tuesday.