Masdar’s giant Abu Dhabi project is designed to do something solar has rarely been asked to do at utility scale: deliver a steady block of electricity around the clock. The bigger question is whether this is a Gulf one-off or the start of a broader shift in how renewable power is built, priced and sold.
For most of the past decade, solar power has won the easy argument and struggled with the harder one. It has become one of the cheapest ways to generate electricity in many markets, but cheap power at noon is not the same thing as dependable power after sunset.
