Jordan’s Renewable Energy Plateau
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Arab Gas Pipeline
10 min read
Central to understanding Jordan's energy history - the article discusses how this pipeline transformed Jordan's energy supply from Egypt starting in 2003, and how its disruption during the Arab Spring created the financial crisis that drove renewable adoption
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Pumped-storage hydroelectricity
10 min read
The article mentions Jordan's delayed pumped-storage hydropower project as a key missing piece for grid stability - understanding how this technology works explains why it's considered essential for renewable energy integration
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Red Sea–Dead Sea Water Conveyance
14 min read
Directly relevant to the Water Desalination and Conveyance Project mentioned as Jordan's path forward - this mega-project connecting the Red Sea to the Dead Sea region represents the intersection of water security and renewable energy demand that could restart Jordan's clean energy growth
This is a guest post by Natalie Thomas, a graduate of the Master of Arts in Sustainable Energy (MASE) program at Johns Hopkins University.
Jordan was once celebrated as a success story for renewable energy adoption in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region. Jordan scaled up its domestic renewable energy capacity rapidly, investing in solar and wind to improve energy security by reducing the reliance on imported fossil fuels. In 2014, the percentage of electricity produced from renewables in Jordan was less than half a percent. By 2021, the percentage had rocketed up to 23%, one of the highest shares in the region. Today, however, renewable energy development in Jordan has effectively come to a halt.
Rapid growth of renewable energy capacity alone does not guarantee a smooth energy transition. I had the privilege of speaking with Mary Warzola and Brian Wood, energy sector leads at Deloitte and USAID in Jordan, to understand the factors behind this gridlock and to draw lessons for countries under pressure to scale up renewables.
1. The Constant Shift in Jordan’s Energy Sources
As a country poor in domestic fossil-fuel resources, Jordan has relied heavily on imports of oil and gas from neighboring countries. Which particular neighbor supplies the energy, however, has changed repeatedly due to regional conflicts and resource discoveries. In the 1980s Saudi Arabia was the largest supplier of oil, which was the major fuel import at the time, but shifted to Iraq following the first Gulf War in 1990. In the late 1990s Egypt made major offshore gas discoveries, developing the Arab Gas Pipeline which officially opened to Jordan in 2003. With the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, and a pipeline of cheap gas from Egypt, gas supplanted oil as the major fuel import and Egypt became Jordan’s main supplier. This shift greatly reduced the cost of power generation for Jordan. By 2011, when an explosion destroyed parts of the pipeline during the Arab Spring conflicts, Egypt had been supplying gas that fueled over 80% of Jordan’s power generation.
While the pipeline was soon fixed, Egypt was running out of surplus gas to export, and from 2011 to 2015 the National Electric Power Company (NEPCO) had to import oil at high cost to displace the loss of gas supply, incurring massive debt. This prompted the build of a liquid natural gas (LNG) receiving terminal to ...
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