Local businesses turning to rooftop solar panels made headlines in the foreign press. The Financial Times eyed the surge in solar setups in the Kingdom as businesses look to cut electricity costs following the government’s scrapping of energy subsidies and the availability of cheaper China-made solar panels.

(** Tap or click the headline above to read this story with all of the links to our background and outside sources.)

Experts attributed the Kingdom's solar energy shift to fiscal reforms, which drove up diesel prices by 44% y-o-y last year, along with cheaper Chinese solar panels, and USD 21.6 bn in Chinese clean technology from 2021 to last October.

“It’s paying back,” the salmon-colored paper quoted Fakeeh Care Group’s head Mazen Fakeeh as saying. The company’s solar setup in its Jeddah car park slashed its electricity bills in 2024 by over SAR 170k. The 103-year-old Tamar Group also saved over SAR 440k after installing solar panels over its logistics hubs’ rooftops in Jeddah and Riyadh, encouraging it to cover all its major distribution centers within two years, according Tamar’s chief supply chain officer Amr Elmansoury.

Who is more inclined to shift? Commercial entities — who pay the highest electricity rate in the Kingdom at SAR 0.3/kWh — stand to gain the most by adopting solar rooftops. “It just makes financial sense,” Faris Al Sulayman, co-founder of the solar startup Haala Energy, told the paper. Industrial users, on the other hand, are less incentivized to switch, given their lower rates at SAR 0.18/kWh, he added.

REMEMBER- All part of a bigger plan: The renewables push comes under Saudi Arabia’s National Renewable Energy Program, which aims to phase out oil burning to reach a 50/50 mix of renewables and gas by 2030. The Energy Ministry is targeting 20 GW of new capacity per year to reach 100-130 GW of output from renewable power by the end of the decade.

Tags: