Beyond oil and gas: possible future scenarios for the electricity sector in Saudi Arabia

This article deals with possible future electricity mix of Saudi Arabia. Three scenarios are evaluated from techno-economic and environmental aspects. In addition to renewable energy technologies, the baseline scenario considers nuclear power, whilst the alternative scenarios exclude the nuclear power and include combined heat and cooling power plants (CHCP) and individual solar thermal cooling to substitute the conventional cooling load. Scenarios II and III differ from each other on the basis of the installed capacity of CHCP, where the latter has higher than the former. We have found that without any subsidy on fossil fuels, the levelised production cost (LPC) of electricity in Scenarios I, II and III are 197, 157 and 149 €/MWh, respectively. Alternatively, if the existing fossil fuel-fired power plants are facilitated with subsidy, excluding the new installations, the LPCs are 117, 70 and 62 €/MWh, respectively. Scenario III leads to direct emissions at 0.39 t CO2eq/MWh, which is 22% and 13% lower than Scenarios I and II, respectively.

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