I hope you all might have read about the Shams 1 power plant opened in the UAE very recently. I think there was an article about it by another TUNZA member. Well, here I am going to write my own experience of visiting the Shams 1 power plant.

I was one of the 3 lucky students to visit the Shams 1 power plant before its opening. I visited it in December 2012. The tour was conducted by the members of the Shams 1 project. It was an amazing and also enlightening experience for me. I got to know many things about solar energy and as an environmentalist, I was more than happy to go there. 

Shams 1 was inaugurated by the president of the UAE, H.H. Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan (the first picture of these).

Some facts:

• With a capacity of 100 megawatts – enough to power 20,000 homes – Shams 1 covers 2.5 square kilometres in Madinat Zayed in the Western Region.
• To harness the power of the sun, Shams 1 relies on a solar field large enough to fit 285 football fields
• If the plant?s power was produced using fossil fuels, it would involve pumping 175,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. Producing the same amount of power using sunlight is the equivalent of planting 1.5 million trees or taking 15,000 cars off the road every year.

Best Regards,

George Zacharia

Contact me on rijorose@hotmail.com or twitter.com/bidsupporters