The Uneven Politics of Decarbonization in the Middle East and North Africa

According to Europe’s largest generator of renewable energy, Norway’s state-owned Statkraft, “A lesser known positive aspect of the green energy shift is that more renewable energy leads to more peace and democracy!”

It is tempting to formulate such grandiose arguments about the possibilities of a transition to renewables ushering in a period of egalitarian and democratic access to energy and a potential for peace. Coal, oil and gas are concentrated energy sources, unevenly distributed across the globe. Wind and solar, on the other hand, are highly distributed, albeit with different intensities.

In theory, this availability offers the promise of a less hierarchical and more inclusive energy politics: energy production that is less dependent on fixed reserves easily controlled by state and corporate actors. It also holds the potential for resource poor countries that rely heavily on fossil fuel imports to become more energy independent. They could possibly even transform into green energy exporters.

But recent initiatives to produce green energy in the Middle East and North Africa illustrate that previously existing dependencies and the predominance of private control over energy production are not often overcome—they are merely reconfigured. Transregionally connected authoritarian elites transform renewables’ distributed nature into concentrated forms of political and economic power. As such, a renewables-based energy system will neither be less prone to conflict, nor automatically marked by fewer socio-economic inequalities.

 

Green Colonial Dependencies

 

Many countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi-Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, are trying to turn themselves into renewable energy or regional electricity hubs. At first sight, these efforts seem like they hold the potential to level existing regional hierarchies between powerful hydrocarbon exporters and vulnerable and dependent importers. But electricity grid integration and energy decentralization do not automatically lead to more equality or less conflict.

As one example, Lebanon’s solar boom has unfolded “as a hyper-individualized, privatized free-for-all shopping spree.”[1] It exacerbates previously existing inequalities, between those who can afford installing a solar system on their rooftops, for instance, and those who are not homeowners to begin with.

At the international scale, the bigger and more interconnected the grid is both between and within states, the easier it is to integrate renewables without compromising grid stability.

Several projects currently underway, however, reproduce colonial logics of resource extraction and external control. For example, through the Morocco-UK Power Project, the British firm, X-Links, plans to eventually cover 7.5 percent of Britain’s electricity consumption through green electricity produced in Morocco. The project aims to build solar and wind farms, as well as huge batteries, in the region of Guelmim-Oued Noun on an area covering the equivalent of London (approximately 580 square miles). These energy plants are slated to produce the same amount of electricity as Morocco currently produces with its entire electricity production capacity. They will be linked to Devon in Southwest England via submarine interconnectors that, at upwards of 2,000 miles long, would be three times longer than the longest submarine interconnector currently under construction. (Considering the resources needed for the production of the batteries and the facilities required for the submarine cables, it is highly questionable whether the project will ever come to fruition.)

Another example is the Great Sea interconnector (formerly known as the Euro-Asia interconnector), which, for the time being, is the longest submarine interconnection project. By 2028, it aims to connect Israel to the European grid via Cyprus and Greece. Once it becomes operational, the European grid, which is already connected to Morocco, will not only connect with renewable energy plants in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, but also connect to wind and solar farms in Israeli-occupied Palestine and the Golan Heights. Expected European and Israeli gains in energy security and diversification stand in marked contrast to high electricity prices and low consumption in occupied Western Sahara and Palestine.

These efforts to facilitate the bidirectional flow of electrons through cables lying on the Mediterranean seabed also contrast harshly with the European Union’s violent suppression of migration. In this context, organizations such as migration-control.info—a transnational activist network that documents the externalization of European migration control—forcefully insist on making a direct link between the EU’s fight against migration and climate imperialism.

And it is not just former European colonial powers that use the field of renewables to promote neo-colonial dependencies. In the immediate run-up to the COP28 UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai, Emirati Blue Carbon, a private company owned by a member of Dubai’s ruling royal family, announced that it had struck carbon offset deals with Zimbabwe, Liberia, Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya. The deals are poised to limit the local population’s access to an area of land larger than Britain, while giving Blue Carbon the right to sell carbon credits. In so doing, it enables the UAE to postpone domestic efforts at energy transition.

In a similar vein, the gradual establishment of a global market for green carbon incentivizes the inefficient production of green hydrogen for export from countries in the Middle East and North Africa to places like Europe, Korea and Japan. Precious renewable capacity will thereby be diverted away from the more energy efficient direct decarbonization of still heavily hydrocarbon dependent local economies.

 

The Financialization of Renewables

 

Despite the distributed nature of renewables, they require certain production, storage and transportation technologies that often inhibit the redistribution of power away from wealthier states and multinational corporations. Mega wind parks, mega photovoltaic and concentrated solar power plants and green hydrogen all require significant investment costs that deter community-owned structures.

For example, Morocco’s important role in Europe’s plans to transition to green energy increases its geopolitical power and the regime’s ability to pressure other countries into supporting its occupation of Western Sahara. Meanwhile, the Moroccan public loses out to transnational corporations, such as German Siemens, Danish Vestas or Saudi ACWA. In light of most Middle Eastern and North African countries’ high level of indebtedness, investing in renewables often means reproducing the power of transnational corporations from Europe, the Arab Gulf and China.

Morocco’s Noor solar plant, which is operated and managed by ACWA, currently accumulates annual losses of more than $80 million to the publicly-owned Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy (Masen).[2] According to a long-term power purchase agreement (PPA), ACWA will transfer ownership of Noor to Masen after 25 years of operating. Until that time, Masen is locked into paying a contractually agreed upon price to the Saudi company, which is significantly higher than the price at which it sells the purchased electricity to Morocco’s national electricity company. Moreover, while effectively guaranteed a profit, this year ACWA faces an expected revenue loss of $47 million due to a forced outage of Noor’s concentrated solar power plant.

The inputs required for the production of renewable energy are also increasing China’s influence in the region, particularly in the Gulf states. Not only does China supply 66 percent of the world’s Lithium-ion batteries.[3] It also has a quasi-monopoly in the solar manufacturing industry (it is projected to hold 80 percent of the world’s capacity by 2026) as well as in the supply of rare earth elements, which are needed for the production of wind turbine generators.[4]

When it comes to democratizing infrastructure, no country in the region is even close to exploiting the enormous potential of decentralized solar energy. In part, this failure is due to deliberate attempts by countries such as Saudi Arabia to drive up global demand for fossil fuels.[5] But it is also due to the preference of existing energy utilities, transnational corporations and international financial institutions for utility-scale projects, as well as incoherent strategic planning, including inadequate transnational electricity grid interconnections. Existing electricity grids in the region still strongly reflect state-centric energy strategies and the priority of securing supplies. In Jordan, for example, renewable energy projects over 1MW were put on hold in 2019 and, since 2022, are only implemented on a case-by-case basis so as not to jeopardize the stability of the inadequately interconnected grid.

Moreover, once built, renewable energy plants, arguably with the exception of concentrated solar power plants, require fairly little maintenance and offer few employment opportunities. Power purchase agreements, like that between Moroccan Masen and Saudi ACWA, use public funds to guarantee private profits. Instead of the populations hosting renewable energy plants, it is distant investment companies and transnational corporations that reap the rewards.

 

Contested Futures

 

In November 2023, amid the intensifying Israeli bombardments of Gaza and growing public protests in Jordan against the country’s peace treaty with Israel, Jordan announced its cancellation of the Emirati-Israeli-Jordanian “Blue-Green prosperity projects.” These projects, for which an initial declaration of intent was signed in November 2021 at Expo 2020 Dubai, aimed to provide green electricity from Jordan to Israel through a mega solar plant, to be constructed by the Emirati firm, Masdar, in Jordan. In exchange, Jordan would import desalinated water from Israel. The protests showed the unrealistic expectations that renewable energy projects would bring about peaceful interdependence.

Recent events, like the above, or the protests at COP28 in Dubai, or the counter-summit of Social Movements to the Annual Meetings of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund in Marrakech are a reminder of the fact that energy is not just a site of hegemony but also of contestation.

Recent events also illustrate how efforts at expanding renewables in the Middle East and North Africa are highly vulnerable to disruption given their dependence on supply chains stretching all around the globe. In December 2023, the Danish shipping company, Maersk, and the German, Hapag-Lloyd, announced the pausing of all journeys through the Red Sea. The decision came in direct response to Houthi attacks on ships heading to Israeli ports, which were intended to pressure Israel to halt its onslaught on Gaza. The attacks led to a drastic increase of container transport costs, including for renewable energy and solar products coming from China and heading to North Africa, Europe and the United States.

As Timothy Mitchell has written, “coal made possible mass democracy and oil set its limits.”[6] Renewables bring with them questions about energy affordability, access and justice. Efforts at shifting to renewables enable energy democracy as much as they enable new forms of energy colonialism. These efforts do not turn entire states into geopolitical winners or losers. Instead, they lead to new interdependencies and reconfigure existing tensions and conflicts in ways that cut across conventional geopolitical formations, changing the scope of what is politically imaginable and possible.

 

[Benjamin Schuetze is a fellow with the Young Academy for Sustainability Research at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and senior researcher at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute.]

 

This article appears in MER issue 311 “Post-Fossil Politics.”

 

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Endnotes

 

[1] Julia Choucair Vizoso and Yara El Murr, “Privatizing the Sun: The Dark Side of Lebanon’s ‘Solar Revolution’,” The Public Source, October 11, 2022.

[2] Conseil Economique, Social et Environnemental, “Accélérer la transition énergétique pour

installer le Maroc dans la croissance verte,” Auto-saisine No. 45 (2020): 32, https://www.cese.ma/media/2020/11/Av-transitionEnergetique-f-1.pdf.

[3] European Commission, “Critical Raw Materials for Strategic Technologies and Sectors in the EU: A Foresight Study,” (Luxembourg, 2020), p. 11.

[4] Reuters, “China will dominate solar supply chain for years – Wood Mackenzie,” November 7, 2023.

[5] Damian Carrington, “Revealed: Saudi Arabia’s grand plan to ‘hook’ poor countries on oil,” The Guardian, November 27, 2023.

[6] Timothy Mitchell, “Power Switch: Building a just energy transition in an age of corporate and imperial power: interview by Nick Buxton with Tim Mitchell, Thea Riofrancos and Ozzi Warwick,” Transnational Institute (TNI), February 21, 2024.