Khaled Al-Sabawi, founder and president of Palestinian green energy pioneers MENA Geothermal, was one of the speakers at this spring’s much-publicised TEDx Ramallah conference. In an engaging and humorous speech, Al-Sabawi detailed the many benefits that geothermal energy has to offer his native land, from lower energy bills and carbon emissions to the prospect of a more independent and self-sufficient energy sector. The speech was reported widely, including by Al-Jazeera English.

As of this week, Al-Sabawi’s talk is now also available online, uploaded to the YouTube channel for TEDx Ramallah, for all to see. In just a few days, the video has attracted almost 55,000 viewers and can be viewed online.

As Green Prophet has reported in the past, MENA Geothermal has completed green energy systems for houses, apartment blocks and office buildings in the West Bank, and was awarded the contract to fit a 1.6MW system at the University of Madaba in Jordan, the Middle East’s largest geothermal installation. One of the driving forces behind MENA Geothermal’s success, says Khaled Al-Sabawi, is a patented improvement to standard geothermal systems which uses limestone dust, a waste product of Palestine’s quarrying and stone-cutting industry, to increase the efficiency and lower the cost of the company’s installations.

As well as MENA Geothermal’s success in winning large scale energy-saving contracts, Khaled Al-Sabawi’s dynamism and commitment have attracted major accolades from the business and green energy sectors. In 2010, Al-Sabawi was named one of the world’s top energy entrepreneurs by the Global Post. And in 2008, his company won the Energy Globe Award, one of the world’s most prestigious environmental prizes, for the geothermal heat and cooling system it fitted at the UCI Headquarters Building, located in Ramallah, Palestine. The UCI building was, until MENA fitted the University of Madaba system, the largest geothermal installation in the region.