Solar power plant potential in the Middle East

With many areas providing over 2,000 peak sun hours per year of insolation and plenty of land available, the potential is almost unlimited. Some challenges remain, e.g. sensitivity of solar modules to blowing sand and salt water, as well as long-term performance of all components (modules, inverters and BOS) in extremely hot environments. Thin film might offer solutions due to the temperature coefficient, but not enough data exists yet for very high ambient temperatures. In terms of geography, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Oman all have done at least some work on solar and steam seems to be gathering for further initiatives (e.g. rooftop C&I program in Abu Dhabi).

If you are looking at the Arabian gulf using satellite model of the isolation of the area, one need to look close at the opacity factor of the atmosphere. Unfortunately, NOAA-19 doesn't travel down your area, whether there is good satellite image system that look at the reflective index and the ir2 and ir3 channels for the lower ir bands of the sun, I would need to look at the current satellite data. The opacity factors are the major issue in determines the isolation capability of any area. You need to understand that generation needs also the projection of shadows from cloud drifting to properly calculate the true solar generation of any large solar plants. It also will give idea of forecasting. The problem with all ground based equipment it needs to be cleaned. Soil and dirty optics can lead to misleading results. The solar panels will become dirty at the same time as the ground base equipment, thus only solution is satellite isolation data. Today, the satellite isolation data is only for the visual part of the spectrum. Someone has developed a method of adding the other 50% of spectrum into the calculation of solar energy namely IR wavelengths. In addition, we have development method of projecting the shadow across your solar plants using cloud drifting from satellites.