Engineer Essa Hilal Al Kuwari is the president of Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation, also known as Kahramaa, and a board member of Qatar Petroleum. Kahramaa is the sole transmission and distribution system owner and operator for the electricity and water sector in Qatar.
Eng. Al Kuwari, who is also the chairman of the Arab Union for Electricity, started his career as a construction engineer and studied at Qatar University and the University of Hull, UK. Here, he gives Eco-Business his outlook on the clean energy sector in the Middle East, ahead of the upcoming annual Qatar Alternative Energy Investor Summit to be held at St Regis, Doha on March 24 to 25.
His Excellency Engineer Essa Hilal Al Kuwari, president of the Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation (Kahramaa)
Kahramaa has an ambitious USD 125 billion investment programme into alternative and renewable energy. Can you share with us your investment plans? What is the outlook for this industry?
This budget was announced to fund the country’s infrastructure projects and to cater the population growth. Out of this, a stake of $22 billion dollars will be set aside for electricity and water infrastructure expansion, and renovation projects.
At the moment, a large financing gap exists in the industry. To close this gap, the mobilization of private investment and finance is crucial. To reduce this gap, we have to bridge the barriers that prevent the mobilization of private investment and finance in the renewable energies industries. Some of these barriers could be “market distortions” that unfairly discriminate against renewable energy, while others have the effect of increasing the costs of renewable energy relative to the alternatives.
What do you think are some main obstacles or challenges in the development of alternative and clean energy in the world, and also specifically for the Middle East?
The barriers to renewable energies could be classified into three categories.
Firstly, costs and pricing, including subsidies for competing fuels; high initial start-up costs, unfavourable power pricing rules and high transaction costs.
Secondly, there are the legal and regulatory concerns, such as lack of legal framework for independent power producers, restrictions on siting and construction liability insurance requirements.
Finally, there is market performance, which involves lack of access to credit, perceived technology performance uncertainty and risk and lack of technical or commercial skills and information.
How can the Middle East region play a role in the global development of clean energy, given that traditionally its involvement has heavily been in oil and gas?
In the Middle East region, the potential for sustainable energy and heat is directly from the sun either by solar technology from photovoltaics (PV) , concentrating solar power (CSP) or wind energy. In Qatar, there is huge potential in solar energy. Kahramaa already started it first renewable energy production from solar power, we have invested in a project with a generating capacity of 200 MW within eight years.
What are you looking forward to at the upcoming Qatar Alternative Energy Investors Summit? What do you hope it will achieve?
The summit will address and discuss all the issues related to the renewable energies, the technical problems and financial barriers, and delegates will be discussing the solutions to these barriers. The summit will also open direct channels of communication between the investors, the energy producers and the utilities. My speech at the summit will touch on the outlook of the global energy and electricity market from now till 2050, the status of renewable energy investments in the world, what types of investments and what plans Qatar, and Kahramaa, has for this sector.
