Follow the sun

RAED KHADER, a Jordanian driver, has an alarming habit of thumbing his mobile phone while at the wheel—albeit on a straight road cutting across the desert. But after scrolling back through almost two years of photos, he finds a picture that tickles him: of camels against a sandy backdrop. Today that same spot outside Ma’an, a poverty-stricken city in south Jordan, is crawling with workers in the final stages of installing five square kilometres (almost two square miles) of solar panels.

He is enraptured by the photovoltaic (PV) modules that shimmer in the desert sunshine. “It’s amazing. I love it. It’s good to see my country develop its own source of energy,” he says. “We have such good sun here. It’s free. Why don’t we use more of it?” In his enthusiasm, he has convinced his daughter to become one of the first Jordanian women to study for a solar-energy engineering degree.