The plant started working a few days ago after a six-month trial period and build-up. It’s based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital and largest city. The facility is almost five football pitches (36.000 m²) big and doubles the size of the former chart-topper in Denmark. With the new solar power plant, it’s now possible to produce enough energy to heat water for 40.000 students at the Princess Noura bint AbdulRahman University, the largest women-only university in the world. The campus consits of 15 academic faculty buildings, various labs and a 700-bed hospital. The $14m plant was manufactured by Austrian research institute GREENoneTEC company and constructed by Jordanian engineering company Millennium Energy Industries. The plant operates via 36,305m2 of solar panels. And based on the lifespan of these panels, the facility could save about 52 million liters of heating oil and 125 million kilograms of CO2.

No, no. Not what you might think. With a summer just as miserably rainy as the ones before and a winter mild but overcast as ever, Germany probably has not clocked more hours of sun shine than usual last year.

But price hikes in fossil fuels and plummeting costs for solar energy systems have lead Germans to opt for solar energy big time in 2011. 18 billion kilowatt-hours to be precise. That’s a staggering 60 percent more in solar electricity output than the previous year, the German Solar Industry Association announced. In 2011 Germans slapped a record number of solar panels onto rooftops and walls of their homes, public buildings and industry installations. By November the one Millionth photo-voltaic system was connected to the grid.

What’s more, even from the economics point of view nuclear power is beginning to look decidedly unsexy compared to solar power – something that die-hard supporters of nuclear hadn’t deemed possible in the foreseeable future. And that’s not just because better economies of scale and new technology are lowering the price tag on solar. Not least due to Fukushima new nuclear power plants have simply become uninsurable.

Greece has been struggling to get out from under its heavy debt crisis for more than a year now, and the government is looking for any opportunity to slash debt and increase revenues. Their new plan? Solar power. The government wants Greece to become Europe’s leading solar power producer.

Renewable energy could be one field where Greece could have a big advantage, especially with the generous amounts of sun the country gets. The government’s new plan, called “Project Helios,” would see Greece’s solar power production multiply from 206 megawatts in 2010 to 2.2 gigawatts by 2020. Right now, Germany is Europe’s leader in photovoltaics, but Greece’s energy minister says his country actually gets 50% more sun. And he also said that if the plan is successful, Greece could help the rest of Europe meet its renewable energy targets by 2020.

So clean energy might be a way to fight debt crises across Europe and elsewhere…