24,000 megawatts vs the current current.

It's amazing that the country is unable to consistently generate 4,000 megawatts (MW) in 2011.

The upstream petroleum sector contributes 65% of the earnings of the federal government. This sector produces an average of 2 million barrels of crude oil per day, with each barrel conservatively sold at $70 on the international market. That means the country earns $140 million of revenue DAILY. Yes, daily. If we assume it costs $10 to produce each barrel, that translates into a net profit of $120 million daily. The government receives approximately 60% of this, so the government's net revenue each DAY from crude oil alone is $72 million, or $21.6 billion annually.

Solar power technology has a higher cost of development than most other sources of power, although the operational and fuel costs are lower. Based on the estimated revenues above, if the country invested 20% of its crude oil earnings ($4.3 billion) in solar power, it would install approximately 811MW of power (which has relatively high cost of development) each year.

Based on the above, an investor committing $4.3 billion annually would match the current level of power production within five years (4,000MW divided by 811MW). That investor would have built out over 24,000MW of power production capacity over a 30 year period, since 1980.

It would be great if the government could provide acceptable reasons for the difference in outcomes, 24,000MW potential per above analysis versus 4,000MW current capacity. Even more capacity would be built using cheaper, conventional power sources. And this analysis is only based on using 20% of 65% of the government's annual income.