A US-UAE research team has investigated how regulatory regimes impacted solar power deployment across six Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Their findings show that the predominant role of the state is expected to continue.

A research team from Khalifa University in the United Arab Emirates and Columbia University in the United States has analyzed the reasons that determined the success or failure of solar energy in the six Arab states of the Persian Gulf and has found that regulatory frameworks play a crucial role.

“That the combination of strategic imperatives and favorable enabling conditions has not resulted in higher levels of solar power deployment in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is the crux of our research puzzle,” the scientists said. “This is because it brings to the fore questions regarding the extent of implementation shortcomings and remaining barriers to deployment, which are aligned with the broader academic literature on the political economy of renewable energy and the evolving role of state-business relations in the Gulf.”

In the paper “What impedes solar energy deployment? New evidence from power developers in the Arab Gulf states,” published in Energy for Sustainable Development, the academics initially conducted a review of the scientific literature on solar power deployment in the GCC, focusing on the barriers and their evolving regulatory landscape.  Secondary data included journal articles, company reports, government publications, and newspaper articles.

Then they held a series of interviews with Gulf-based solar developers and other energy stakeholders. “As far as we are aware, this is the only academic work that leverages original interviews with power developers from the region,” they emphasized.

The main barriers identified by the research team are geography, high upfront costs, and cultural practices, as well as the so-called rentierism, which refers to the rentier status that developed nations allegedly pay to Middle Eastern countries for the rights to natural resources such as oil.

It also stressed, however, that the previous studies showed that, due to co-benefits in terms of job creation, industrial development, and expanding stakeholder networks, renewables can help increase the resilience of the rentier model. “The private sector within the Gulf has also been allowed to lead the rollout of distributed solar power projects,” it further explained. “This is because the much smaller volume of distributed generation – and its private sector actors – is unlikely to undermine the centrality of a hydrocarbon-based economy and the power of current stakeholders of a state-directed economic model.”

After conducting their interviews and analysis, the scientists concluded that the region will keep being dependent on governance, regulatory frameworks, and implementation capacities of the state for solar deployment in the future, with the main challenges being competition among differently-sized developers, procurement, labor, and evenness across markets.

“The strengthened role of the state as an economic actor is not necessarily peculiar to the Gulf or a symptom of the ‘rentier’ model of state-society relations,” they further explained. “Rather, it is a worldwide phenomenon that has responded to global challenges such as the covid-19 pandemic and climate change as well as to concerns over national and supply chain security as underlined by an increasing number of industrial policy measures adopted by the US, China, and the EU among others.”