If you want an image of where the internal contradictions of the fossil fuel economy are headed as disruptive clean energy and a warming planet transform the 21st century, consider Kuwait.
The first real boomtown of the 1960s Arab oil rush, its people have a richer endowment of crude than any other nation on earth. The 101.5 billion barrels of reserves are equivalent to about 23,000 barrels for every resident — more than double the next-placed country. At current prices, this geological inheritance works out at about US$4.3 million per citizen. About two-thirds of Kuwait’s 4.4 million residents are non-citizen workers.
Yet Kuwait is struggling to keep the lights on. In what was for decades one of the richest countries on the planet, rolling power outages have become a fact of life over the past two summers.
Illustration: Louise Ting
Electricity was cut to 30 regions in April as temperatures soared and households cranked up the air-conditioning. At the peak, about 7.3 percent of demand went unmet, and the fire service warned locals not to use elevators in case they got stuck in apartment blocks that lost power for hours at a time. Factories were ordered to halt all operations between 11am and 5pm, a situation that lasted for five months until the bans were finally lifted last week.
Blackouts were still happening through May, with outages in 40 residential, and 10 agricultural and industrial areas. By June, with temperatures hitting 51°C, the government was begging residents to turn down air-conditioners, install efficient light bulbs, and switch off appliances. Ministers even sent out drones to spot illicit cryptocurrency mining operations.
The simplistic explanation for this would be to tell the story that defenders of fossil fuels trot out to blame any network disruption on renewables. That is not going to work in a country where 99.6 percent of power generation is fueled by oil or gas. Every honest grid manager knows that such problems are never the fault of a single technology, but rather the result of years of miscalculations and under-investment.
In Kuwait, the biggest factors have been political gridlock, combined with a refusal to look the reality of the energy transition and a changing climate in the eye.
Unusually for the Gulf, Kuwait had a parliament with a measure of influence until the emir suspended democracy last year, but infighting has been endemic. With 15 different ministers of electricity, water and renewable energy over the past decade alone, decisions on necessary upgrades to creaking infrastructure were deferred until it was too late.
Added to that is the wasteful way the country consumes power. Subsidies of US$3,200 per person mean electricity bills cover just 5 percent of grid costs. In Kuwait, 60 percent of energy is used by air-conditioners, but the sorts of narrow, shady streets that Middle Eastern people have been building for millennia to protect themselves from the heat are effectively illegal due to outdated building codes for the suburban sprawl of villas where citizens live.
There has also been a dismal failure to take advantage of all that sunlight by installing photovoltaic panels. Imports last year came to about US$1.5 million, less than struggling states such as Liberia and South Sudan. Neighboring Saudi Arabia could be on track to shift 50 percent of its power generation to renewables by 2030, but even a more modest target of 15 percent in Kuwait “could be out of reach,” Rystad Energy AS analyst Nishant Kumar wrote last week.
Kuwait could afford to be far more ambitious. It is a small country, but about 90 percent is desert. Roughly 50 gigawatts of solar power generation would be sufficient to meet all existing electricity demand, equivalent to what China installed in April alone. That would cover just 5 percent of the country, or 900km2 — not a vast area, compared with the 116km2 recently set aside for a new port northeast of the capital. It would also be cheaper than fossil power, and free up more oil and gas for export.
Such a move would also leave the country less at the mercy of foreign governments. About two-thirds of domestic gas production comes out of the same wells as its crude, so when OPEC cuts its oil output quota the emirate must pump less methane, too, forcing it to import from Qatar instead to fuel its generators.
The result is a bizarre situation where a petrostate is also one of the world’s biggest liquified natural gas importers, bringing in about the same amount last year as the UK, which has 14 times as many people.
Cooler fall temperatures should give Kuwaitis some respite over the months ahead, but in a best-case scenario it might be years before the backlog of decaying infrastructure is fixed. While other Gulf states have diversified their economies for a post-petroleum era, Kuwait is still wedded to the dreams of the 1960s oil boom. The economy shrank in three out of the past five years.
In 2007, Kuwait was, by some measures, the richest nation in the world after Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Right now, it is barely ahead of Poland and Estonia. At a time when US President Donald Trump is waging war on clean energy and even the EU might be wavering, it is a cautionary tale of where fossil fuel addiction can lead.
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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