Saudi Arabia’s current online renewable energy capacity as tendered by the renewable energy program is 700 MW. The online capacity figure is expected to increase “sharply” over the next few years as projects with a total capacity of 7.1 GW have been tendered to the market and are currently in various stages of completion. The Middle East has up until now mostly lagged the rest of the world with total renewable energy capacity last year rising 5.4% to 23.962 GW, led by Iran at 11.929 GW, Israel at 2.615 GW and the UAE at 2.579 GW. Most of the Iran’s capacity is renewable hydropower, with solar at 3.8% of the total. Global capacity climbed 9.25% last year, with all regions except Africa, Central America/Caribbean and Eurasia showing faster growth than the Middle East. Saudi Arabia’s total last year jumped almost fourfold to 443 MW from 113 in 2020 after no growth in 2020 but was still well behind Iraq and Jordan.
Some countries in the Middle East region may still see lower growth. Dubai’s only utility DEWA imposed lower limits on distributed solar project sizes based on consumer connected load, with an overall cap of 1 MW, which could hamper the sector’s growth in the emirate, particularly commercial and industrial solar projects.