Saudi Arabia's path toward solar energy
November wasn't a good month for the planet. On November 26, the UN Environment Program warned that the world was failing to curb carbon emissions fast enough. Even if all current commitments under the Paris Agreement to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius were met, "temperatures can be expected to rise to 3.2 degrees Celsius this century." We must, declared UNEP in its annual "Emissions Gap" report, "close the 'commitment' gap between what we say we will do and what we need to do."
Governments, it added, "cannot afford to wait. Economies must shift to a decarbonization pathway now." The following day, a group of international scientists warned in the journal Nature that the world may already have passed beyond the point of no return, citing nine "tipping point" clues - ranging from increasingly frequent droughts in the Amazon rainforest to the loss of ice in the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland - "potentially committing the world to long-term irreversible changes."
UNEP, on the other hand, held out a lifeline - and it's one that fossil-fuel giant Saudi Arabia is in the throes of grasping. Only "a vast expansion of renewable electricity generation" can hope to arrest the planet's descent into disaster, said UNEP, adding that this was "an easy win" because the necessary technology exists.
According to a new report from the International Energy Agency, offshore wind farms alone could generate more electricity than the world needs - 36,000 terawatt-hours a year compared with current global demand of 23,000TWh.
In 2018 the world added a record but still meager 108 gigawatts of solar power, and 50GW driven by wind - a small but significant start. In 2018 only 12.9% of global electricity was generated by wind or solar technology and, says UNEP, "renewables need to grow six times faster." Nowhere is that more true than in the Middle East, where despite ample supplies of wind and sunshine, in 2018 only 0.3% of energy came from renewables, compared with 40.2% in the Asia-Pacific region, 30.7% in Europe and 21.2% in North America.
In 2018 Saudi Arabia generated precisely no electricity from wind power and only a wholly insignificant 0.2TWh of power from solar - a tiny fraction of the 383TWh consumed by the kingdom that year.
That, however, is about to change - and where fossil-fuel giant Saudi Arabia leads, others will surely follow.
In 2016 Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 development blueprint recognized that "the kingdom's impressive natural potential for solar and wind power generation remains largely untapped" and pledged to generate 9.5GW of renewable energy by 2030. That modest ambition has already been improved upon as Saudi, increasingly focused on diversifying its economy away from reliance on fossil fuels, has set its green sights higher.
Now the target is 27.3GW of renewable energy capacity by 2024 and 58.7GW by 2030. Saudi is moving fast.
One of the first major projects is Saudi Arabia's inaugural and the Middle East's largest wind farm - a US$500 million, 415MW cluster of 99 turbines at Dumat al-Jandal in the northern region of al-Jouf, 900 kilometers northwest of Riyadh.
The contract to build it was won only in January by French energy company EDF Renewables and Abu Dhabi's Masdar. The wind farm could be supplying electricity to the national grid by the spring of 2022, in the process creating hundreds of jobs, and cutting use of fossil fuels by the equivalent of more than 800,000 barrels of oil a year.
On November 27, the same day Nature published its dire warning, a 300MW photovoltaic solar power plant at nearby Sakaka was connected to the Saudi grid for the first time. It will soon be supplying clean energy to 45,000 homes, saving 500 tons of carbon dioxide a year.
Much more is in the pipeline, including plans to develop 30 solar-energy parks and five more wind farms across the country by 2030.
The wind of change may also be blowing through the energy policies of other Persian Gulf states. Masdar, a world leader in wind farms, gaining invaluable experience developing major projects in countries including the UK, Seychelles and Serbia, has been slow to exploit the regional potential. That is now changing.
In addition to its role at Dumat al-Jandal, it has developed the 50MW Dofar wind farm in Oman, the first large-scale wind project in the Gulf Cooperation Council region to go online. The first of the 13 turbines was connected to the grid in August and the rest will follow before the end of the year, supplying 16,000 homes.