Qatar

Ministry of Industry, Commerce, and Tourism had prepared guidelines to enable faster adoption of electric vehicles by ensuring safe, reliable, accessible, and affordable charging infrastructure and eco-system. The government is also planning to implement a technical regulation as early as July to allow importing such vehicles. The authority was mentioning that several companies had expressed their interest in investing in solar rooftop installations for government buildings, almost 535 buildings are there in the Kingdom that could run on solar power. The Sustainable Energy Authority, along with the Education Ministry, launched a tender for installing Solar energy systems in eight government schools as a pilot project. These schools have over 20 buildings selected to install Solar systems in exchange for a tariff that the bidding companies put on the tender and bid at lower than the government tariff. Bahrain launches global tender for Solar Farm within Formula 1 Grand Prix Circuit in partnership with country’s Sustainable Energy Authority (SEA) via government tender board for Build-Own-OperateMaintain (BOOM) grid-tied solar PV power plant with a minimum capacity of 3 MW. Accordingly, five bidders – International Irec Energy, Aradous Energy Generations, Esmaely Lenzohm Electrical, Down Town Construction Company, and Yusuf bin Ahmed Kanoohad submitted their proposals.

Qatar sets the country goal of generating 20% of its energy needs from Solar power by 2030. The first utility-scale Al Kharsaah photovoltaic (PV) power project of 800 MW has been awarded to a consortium of Marubeni, Total, and Siraj Energy. The project will be built under different phases. The 350 MW first phases will be commissioned in 2021, while the full 800 MW Al Kharsaah photovoltaic (PV) project will be connected to the grid by 2022.

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The country has around 5 MW of Solar PV installed capacity by 2020, but the government wants to reduce its dependability on fossil fuel sources of electricity generation, and move towards renewable energy especially solar. With this project, KAHRAMAA (Qatar General Electricity & Water Corporation) managed to avail competitive power generation prices, save significant natural gas quantities used in traditional power generation, reduce carbon and other emissions and preserve the surrounding environment. During the project’s lifetime, the plant will contribute to reducing 26 million tons of CO2, which aligns with the objectives of the national program for conservation and energy efficiency “Tarsheed” to reduce 1 million tons of carbon emissions annually until 2022.