Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Jeffrey Beyer and Stephen Gitonga of the UN Development Program present an overview of Saudi Arabia’s full court press to get 50% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. The kingdom is aware that fossil fuels, the source of its fabulous wealth, are on their way out. Its leaders want to have a modern electro-state in place when the pumps fall idle.
The UNDP officials say that Saudi Arabia has connected over 10 gigawatts of renewable energy to its grid and has another 33 gigawatts in the pipeline. Saudi officials want to install 20 gigawatts of green energy every year, so as to reach their goal of 50% of the grid in only 5 years. They write, “Saudi Arabia is deploying solar energy at a faster rate than any country in history.”
It is an astonishing statistic, though it should be put into context. China is the country that has put in the most solar, and in quantities that dwarf that of the Saudis. It is just that they have been working at it for a while. Saudi Arabia, having spent six years preparing the stage, is now taking off like a rocket.
Saudi Arabia also already has 2 gigawatts of battery storage in place, ensuring that it can store wind and solar energy for when the wind dies down or for night time use. It has another 5.5 gigawatts of battery storage in the pipeline, and wants to double that by 2030.
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Although it may seem paradoxical for an oil state like Saudi Arabia to go big into wind and solar, it makes perfect economic sense, as I have argued elsewhere. About 38% of Saudi power plants use petroleum and 62% of electricity generation is done by domestically produced fossil gas. Wind and solar are cheaper ways of making electricity domestically. As long as some countries in the outside world will buy Saudi oil and gas, it makes much more economic sense to export those commodities for a profit than to use them up at home, with a government subsidy. In a recent year, Saudi Arabia lost $11 billion on energy generation, and demand is increasing 10% a year. The kingdom needs renewables for its economic health.
The Saudis are having China’s Goldwind (“the Huawei of green energy”) build for it the largest wind farm in the world near Riyadh, with a nameplate capacity of 3 gigawatts when it is finished early in 2028, only a little over 2 years from now. This project is an example of China’s mature and sophisticated clean energy technology being deployed to help an oil giant move away from fossil fuels.
There was a time when a massive power plant in the global south would have been built by American firms, but the backward Republican Party with its bondage to Big Oil is killing the American green energy industries. So it is Chinese firms that are picking up these contracts. One partner in the consortium along with the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) is the Arabian American Oil Company, ARAMCO, which developed Saudi oil in the late forties and fifties. Originally American-dominated, it was nationalized by the Saudis in the 1970s. Despite its name, therefore, it no longer has anything to do with America. ARAMCO is a partner in the Goldwind project! Even it has taken up with China.
Goldwind is designing its wind turbines to function in the extreme heat of Saudi summers, when temperatures can exceed 122º F.
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Another big wind farm, with a 1.5 gigawatt capacity, is planned at Dawadmi near Riyadh by a consortium led by South Korea’s KEPCO. It has achieved a new world record for the lowest cost of producing electricity from wind energy.
The 1.4 gigawatt Najran Solar Project is being built in partnership with Masdar, the UAE-based clean energy firm. It can generate electricity for about a U.S. penny a kilowatt hour, the second lowest price for this sort of power in the world. The only plant that is cheaper is also in Saudi Arabia. Najran, in the southwest of the kingdom down near Yemen, gets a lot of sunshine. But a penny a kilowatt hour? Fossil fuels may as well just pack up and go away. At their best, they are six to ten times that.
The kingdom has 7 big renewable energy projects in the pipeline at the moment, at a cost of over $8 billion, with a goal of producing 15 gigawatts of power.
“Solar Kingdom,” Digital, Dall-E / Clip2Comic, 2025
The giant Saudi green energy company, ACWA, announced this month that renewables in the kingdom no longer need government subsidies. The technology, mostly Chinese, has fallen in price so dramatically, and the kingdom is so well endowed with sunshine and steady winds, that sustainable energy is a money-maker in its own right.
ACWA Power’s Mohammed Abu Nyan told Sharq Business reporter Maya Hajij, “if it were not for technology, in which Chinese innovations play a key role, we would not have witnessed what has been achieved so far in the energy transformation side.”
He is convinced that large language models (“artificial intelligence”) will enable a doubling of green energy production. Abu Nyan does not seem to have said how, exactly, in this interview. But perhaps AI can help in solar panel and wind turbine design and placement for maximum efficiency. Data centers are energy hogs, but it would be an interesting development if they really could pay for themselves twice over by redesigning greentech so as to achieve efficiency breakthroughs.
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