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DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Abdulrazak al-Jenan swept the dust off his solar panel on his apartment roof overlooking Damascus. Syria’s largest city was mostly pitch-black, the few speckles of light coming from the other households able to afford solar panels, batteries, or private generators.
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Al-Jenan went thousands of dollars in debt to buy his solar panel in 2019. It was an expensive coping mechanism at the time, but without it, he couldn’t charge his phone and run the refrigerator.
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Syria has not had more than four hours of state electricity per day for years, as a result of the nearly 14-year civil war that ended with the ouster of former President Bashar Assad in December.
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Syria’s new leaders are hoping renewable energy will now become more than a patchwork solution. Investment is beginning to return to the country with the lifting of U.S. sanctions, and major energy projects are planned, including an industrial-scale solar farm that would secure about a tenth of the country’s energy needs.
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“The solution to the problem isn’t putting solar panels on roofs,” Syria’s interim Energy Minister Mohammad al-Bashir told The Associated Press. “It’s securing enough power for the families through our networks in Syria. This is what we’re trying to do.”
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Restoring the existing energy infrastructure
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Some of the efforts focus on simply repairing infrastructure destroyed in the war. The World Bank recently announced a $146 million grant to help Syria repair damaged transmission lines and transformer substations. Al-Bashir said Syria’s infrastructure that has been repaired can provide 5,000 megawatts, about half the country’s needs, but fuel and gas shortages have hampered generation. With the sanctions lifted, that supply could come in soon.
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More significantly, Syria recently signed a $7 billion energy deal with a consortium of Qatari, Turkish, and American companies. The program over the next three and a half years would develop four combined-cycle gas turbines with a total generating capacity estimated at approximately 4,000 megawatts and a 1,000-megawatt solar farm. This would “broadly secure the needs” of Syrians, said Al-Bashir.
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While Syria is initially focusing on fixing its existing fossil fuel infrastructure to improve quality of life, help make businesses functional again, and entice investors, the U.N. Development Program said in May that a renewable energy plan will be developed in the next year for the country.
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The plan will look at Syria’s projected energy demand and determine how much of it can come from renewable sources.
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“Given the critical role of energy in Syria’s recovery, we have to rapidly address energy poverty and progressively accelerate the access to renewable energy,” Sudipto Mukerjee, UNDP’s resident representative in Syria, said in a statement announcing the plan.
https://financialpost.com/pmn/with-sanctions-lifted-syria-looks-to-solar-power-as-more-than-a-patchwork-fix-to-its-energy-crisis
