Qatar Adds 875 MW of Solar Capacity

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Qatar Adds 875 MW of Solar Capacity

QatarEnergy said it has put online two photovoltaic generation facilities with a combined capacity of 875 megawatts (MW). The projects in the industrial cities of Mesaieed and Ras Laffan will raise Qatar’s solar power production capacity to 1,675 MW, according to a press release by the state-owned energy company. “The construction of solar power plants […]

QatarEnergy said it has put online two photovoltaic generation facilities with a combined capacity of 875 megawatts (MW).

The projects in the industrial cities of Mesaieed and Ras Laffan will raise Qatar’s solar power production capacity to 1,675 MW, according to a press release by the state-owned energy company.

“The construction of solar power plants is one of Qatar’s most important initiatives to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, to develop sustainability projects, and to diversify electricity generation sources”, said Energy Affairs Minister Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, who is also QatarEnergy president and chief executive. “These plants are expected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 4.7 million tons annually”.

The Gulf state aims to raise the share of renewable energy in its natural gas-dominated power mix from the current five percent to 18 percent by 2030, as declared in the Qatar National Renewable Energy Strategy released April 27, 2024. The strategy focuses on solar generation.

Qatar now has three operational solar facilities, the other being the 800-MW Al-Kharsaa plant, which was put onstream 2022. The facility is owned by QatarEnergy, Marubeni Corp. and TotalEnergies SE.

The three solar plants are expected to cover about 15 percent of total peak power demand, Al-Kaabi said.

“We have moved beyond relying on the expertise of others for the construction, operation, and maintenance of solar power plants, and have begun implementing such projects using our own national expertise”, Al-Kaabi said.

Last year QatarEnergy announced a new solar project with a generation capacity of 2,000 MW. It expects the Dukhan Solar Power Plan to start operation by 2030.

Qatar relies on gas-powered thermal plants for over 90 percent, or 11.3 gigawatts, of its total power production, according to the renewables strategy prepared by the Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation (Kahramaa).

“However, the expected commissioning of 2.2 GW of new thermal electricity generation by 2027 is an indication of the country’s gradual approach for integrating renewable energy in its power mix”, Qatar’s sole power and water transmission and distribution operator said.

“Qatar has tremendous potential to increase its use of renewable energy sources due to the high quality of the nation’s solar resource”, Kahramaa said. “The country’s global horizontal irradiance (GHI) level is one of the highest in the world, with ten locations having a four-year average GHI rating of more than 2,000 kWh [kilowatt hours] generated per square meter per year”.

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Deep Data Center: Neoclouds as the ‘Picks and Shovels’ of the AI Gold Rush

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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