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2022-04-01

Middle East Accelerates Clean Energy Transition

Despite the pandemic challenges and economic slowdown worldwide in 2020, renewable energy has surfaced as a real alternative that heralds a brighter future.

As nations across the globe look for pragmatic and innovative solutions to secure a lower carbon future, the Middle East is evidently accelerating and leading the clean energy transition.

The most glaring evidence is the scaling up of the Middle East’s smart city ambitions, which are speeding up thanks to the willingness of the private and public sectors to pool their resources and work together.

New initiatives and programmes powered by massive investments are already underway in much of the region. Realising the Smart City dream is an ambition long held by leading Middle Eastern nations. But beyond the presentations and ‘wow factor’ technologies, the core principle is simple – smart cities will improve lives by offering sustainability.

Last year witnessed plenty of announcements and updates on plans for both new and existing smart city projects. However, in wake of numerous climate-related disasters and the sobering culmination of COP26, the stage is now set for an even more rapid adoption of smart city principles and design ethos in the Middle East.

The lure of making cities smart is both ecological and economic. ‘Smartification’ of cities is expected to generate over US$20 trillion in economic benefits by the end of 2026. But big rewards require big investment, a realisation that is prompting smart city investments to more than double from US$100 billion annually in 2021 to over US$250 billion per year by 2030.

For the Middle East, this desire to get smarter, faster, can be seen in the rapid promotion of new smart city initiatives, and importantly, refinements of existing plans. Spending on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is rising across the region, as the leveraging of data through digitalisation technologies takes hold at a more rapid rate.

Bustling Region

A cursory glance at certain regional developments will reflect the reality on the ground.

Egypt’s minister of communication and IT recently announced plans to build 17 smart cities that are “totally reliant on technology”. This is part of a broader national initiative to connect 25,000 villages to the Internet.

Once the current Expo 2020 in Dubai ends in March 2022, 260,000 square feet of floor area of LEED Gold and Platinum structures from the Expo will form the basis for a wholly sustainable and human-centric future city, District 2020. Its buildings will consume at least 50 per cent less water than typically designed ones. Around 22 per cent of all its energy needs will be met by rooftop solar panels. Plus, everything within the city will be accessible within a 15-minute walk or bike ride.

Gartner predicts that IT spending in the Middle East and North Africa region will rise to over US$1.7bn in 2022. Smarter data management and supporting technologies will form the bulk of this total spend.

Private sector innovation and investment is essential to smart city development efforts. As many as 61 per cent of all Middle Eastern companies are planning to invest in 5G-enabled campus networks, accelerating the digital transition of their businesses as well as their local areas.

Neom: Living Laboratory

Saudi Arabia’s US$500 billion smart city is something of a bellwether for the Middle East’s smart city development journey.

Neom is a bold dream of a new future, an accelerator of human progress that will embody the future of innovation in business, livability and sustainability. It is described as the world’s most ambitious project.

December 2021 witnessed a flurry of new deals inked between Neom and international conglomerates to provide advanced infrastructure and services to the megacity, as it begins to take shape. The concept behind these projects is to improve the daily lives of the future citizens of Neom by making their surroundings and urban interactions more sustainable.

Zero-Emission Transport

On December 2, 2021 German aircraft manufacturer Volocopter and Neom formed a joint venture company to “operate the world’s first bespoke public vertical mobility system”. It will utilise the vaunted ‘air taxi’ service approach that generated such buzz in the UAE several years ago.

This joint venture will be responsible for giving Neom citizens the chance to connect to the city’s zero-emissions public mass-transport systems easily, by supplying both air taxis and seamless take-off/set-down infrastructure at key points in the system.

The initial order of 15 Volocopter aircraft will start flight operations within the next two to three years. If successful, this will be a major feather in Neom’s cap, providing a wholly sustainable transport system that embodies the spirit of the ‘city of the future’.

Secure Living

On December 9, 2021, Neom signed another deal with Arqit Quantum, to build and trial the ‘Cognitive City’ quantum security system. Not only will the system defend the smart city and its inhabitants against cyberattacks, it will also utilise blockchain solutions to enable frictionless, sustainable and energy-efficient financial payments, smart contracts and other digital transactions.

The system’s first major trial is scheduled for the first half of 2022.

Floating Industrial Complex

Neom’s Oxagon, which is set to be the largest floating industrial complex in the world, was announced in mid-November. It is designed to be a radically different model for future manufacturing centres, with a careful eye for sustainability alongside job and wealth creation.

Oxagon will be powered by clean energy. However, the sustainability vision goes much further than this, and envisages all commercial partners using the latest in Artificial Intelligence, automation and green technologies to make their operations as environmentally friendly as possible. Its very shape is designed to minimise its impact on the environment and provide optimal land usage, allowing for the preservation of 95 per cent of the area’s natural environment.

Going by the trend, one can now expect Middle East smart city plans to move forward more rapidly, especially when it comes to elements that secure and prove their long-term sustainability credentials.

Shining Times

Despite setbacks such as the pandemic and polysilicon price hikes, solar is in a stronger position than last year and is set to make more expansive gains this year.

Clean energy transitioning is still the fastest avenue for decarbonising the planet. Solar cost is still falling overall, even as technology advances boost the efficiency of solar solutions.

This assessment is borne out by the overall growth of installed solar capacity, as another 290GW was added globally in 2021, making it another record-breaking year. Equally importantly, solar is the dominant force in future power generation plans. While oil and coal-fired power plants are being phased out, renewables will account for about 95 per cent global power-generation capacity from now to the end of 2026, and half of this total will be down to solar alone. By all accounts, the 2020s are solar’s time to shine.

To put the current solar growth situation in perspective, solar and wind combined only made up 1.7 per cent of global energy generation in 2010. A decade later, that figure had shot up to 8.7 per cent – more than a fivefold increase. Spurring this on, costs associated with producing photovoltaic electricity have fallen by over 85 per cent during the same period, causing positive feedback loops, where cheaper costs fuel faster and more ambitious solar deployments.

If the world is going to successfully hit its global decarbonisation target and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C, then renewables will need to account for at least 55 per cent of all produced energy. Solar will have to bear the majority of this load. While an increase from 8.7 per cent to 55 per cent in the current decade would be another six to seven-fold jump, the exponential growth rate of solar means that this outcome is by no means unachievable.

Ray of Hope in ME

The Middle East has long been positioned to benefit more from the rising proportion of solar into the global energy mix. The region aims to be more than a strong solar producer; it also wants to be both a hub for, and exporter of, solar expertise, innovation and supporting solutions.

This can be seen in the recent opening in Tabuk Industrial City, Saudi Arabia of the region’s largest factory for solar panels production. Costing over US$186 million, this is a cutting-edge facility that uses the latest in automation technologies to produce solar panels more sustainably and cost-effectively than ever.

Energy storage solutions (ESS) are another crucial piece of the solar puzzle. The region has 30 major energy storage projects planned for between 2021 and 2025, in response to the pressing need to scaling up renewable capacity. This can only be done in a reliable manner if effective ESS is incorporated into the deployment timetable. While pumped hydro storage (PHS) and electrochemical energy storage – mainly sodium-sulphur and lithium-ion batteries – are among the chief ESS currently used, other emerging solutions may quickly find prominence within this mix.

This month, a PHD Student in the Photo Catalytic Synthesis Group, Kaijian Zhu, caught the industry’s eye with his work on a new type of photoelectrochemical cell that can both capture and store the energy from sunlight. The focus of his work is on charge transfer dynamics inside the photocathode of such cells. If successful, Zhu’s work may prove critical in boosting ESS efficiency across the industry.

Last year saw the second Solar Decathlon Middle East (SDME) take place in Dubai, and innovative solar solutions were an integral part of a net-zero energy home design from Team Esteem, of Heriot-Watt University in the UK and Heriot-Watt University in Dubai.

While the key problems of the solar industry are still present, namely high material prices and the unending pandemic, the push factors appear to be more than sufficient to overcome obstacles when it comes to the grand strategic view of the global clean energy transition. This is particularly true of the Middle East, where diversification away from hydrocarbon-based wealth and influence makes solar the natural successor to oil, given the abundance of sunlight and suitable solar-producing conditions in the region.

Looking forward, an acceleration of solar is not just the stated political agenda of the day, it is also an environmental and socio-economic necessity.

Credit: www.worldfutureenergysummit.com

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