Introduction to Middle East Solar PV Industry

IntroductIon

The installed Solar Power capacity by 2020 in the middle east countries has crossed the 7 GW mark, UAE Kingdom was the leader among the middle eastern region in terms of solar installed capacity followed by Israel, Jordan which have installed over a GW of Solar in their country. In the Middle East region, countries are coming forward in reaching their renewable energy goals, and many new investments are coming into the region due to demand in the renewable space. In its effort to create solutions to reduce carbon emissions and enhance energy security, the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Centre (KAPSARC) explores in a recent Data Insight publication, entitled “Trends in Global Solar PV Installation,” that the total global capacity of solar photovoltaics (PV) installations increased 80 times in 13 years from 2007 to 2019, equivalent to 627 GW at the end of 2019. This capacity equates to about 2.8% of global electricity generation. Many countries want to reduce their dependency on fossil fuel sources of electricity generation and shift towards renewable especially Solar. Distributed solar playing an important role by allowing the residential, commercial, and industrial customers to go for solar who are not able to take part in the largest utilityscale projects. Even in a few of the Middle East countries, the goal of introducing rooftop solar is to boost the local installers, components manufacturers as they are claiming that the utility-scale projects are being dominated by foreign companies starting from winning the tenders to funding as well as designing, procuring the equipment and commission the projects are being done through a foreign entity, at the end they took away the profit share to their host countries. Many new small tenders are being funded by the government, but due to delays in the distributions of funds, many installers are going bankrupt, even few are in the mid of the projects for few months and not able to execute due to lack of funds availability.

in MWs

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There is a lot of potential for solar power capacity in the Middle Eastern region due to 365 sunny days, even the irradiations level is excellent. But due to proper policy, regulation many of the Middle East countries still lacking solar installations. Again, 2020 was a bad year due to the COVID pandemic, many of the countries in the region were not able to commission good capacity of solar projects, and even a few countries have not commissioned any capacity. But the sun is rising again in the Middle East and many projects which were under development stage or stuck due to pandemic are going to get commissioned in 2021.

Solar PV Installed Capacity in Middle East

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