A Middle East bank says:

Renewables accounted for 57 per cent of global power investment in
new generation in the period 2000-2013.

And that’s even with all the legal and financial roadblocks
thrown up by entrenched fossil fuel companies and electric utilities.
The report recommends aligning policy and finance:

To deliver a sustainable energy system for the long term, the
financial community and policymakers need to work collaboratively:
stimulating and de-risking investment, and developing innovative
structures which can support the financing of future energy.

With that collaboration, the Middle East and North Africa could
see this kind of energy deployment scenario:

Note that blue exponential curve for solar power for more than
a decade, until about 2028, when presumably the bank report writers
think the market for electricity there will mostly be saturated.

But why wait?

We do not need to wait for the required technologies to appear. Low
carbon, sustainable technologies are already on the market, with
costs that are dropping rapidly as the industry matures and grows.
They are already market-tested and cost effective, especially for
solar PV and on-shore wind. This situation is robust against changes
in the price of oil.

Anastasia Pantsios, Ecowatch, 5 March 2015,

Oil Can’t Compete With Renewables, Says National Bank of Abu Dhabi:
Returns on fossil fuel investments aren’t keeping up with solar and
wind, and are less likely to do so in the future, says bank report,

Energy demand is expected to triple in the next 15 years in the
rapidly growing Persian Gulf region — already the biggest
energy consumer per capita in the world — a demand far
outstripping the current supply. Yet, despite the recent plunge in
oil prices, the report says that that demand will be more
efficiently filled by renewables, offering more reliable and
lucrative investment opportunities than oil.

“Some of the report’s findings may surprise you, as they did
me,” writes NBAD CEO Alex Thursby in the report’s
introduction. “For example, renewable energy technologies are
far further advanced than many may believe: solar photovoltaic (PV)
and on-shore wind have a track record of successful deployment, and
costs have fallen dramatically in the past few years. In many parts
of the world, indeed, they are now competitive with hydrocarbon
energy sources. Already, more than half of the investment in new
electricity generation worldwide is in renewables. Potentially, the
gains to be made from focusing on energy efficiency are as great as
the benefits of increasing generation. Together, these help us to
reframe how we think about the prospects for energy in the
region.”

Among the report’s surprising findings are that fossil fuels are
already uncompetitive with solar in terms of price, and that would
be true even if oil fell as low as $10 a barrel. And with the supply
of fossil fuels finite and increasingly difficult to extract, the
bank believes that almost all future investments will be in
renewables.

“Prices have fallen dramatically in the past few years: solar
PV falling by 80 percent in six years, and on-shore wind by 40
percent,” it says. “The speed of this shift towards grid
parity with fossil fuels means that, in many instances, perceptions
of the role of renewables in the energy mix have not caught up with
reality.”

The actual report,

“Financing the Future of Energy: The opportunity for
the Gulf’s financial services sector”,
also harps on this:

Cost of energy efficiency is less than half the cost of increasing
energy production

And again:

Industrial applications of energy efficiency can deliver 100 per
cent payback in five years.

Here’s an illustration that the single most cost-effective
energy investment is switching to LED lighting,
followed by efficiency of appliances, motors, and vehicles,
including hybrid vehicles.

Note the numerous cost-effective agricultural items,
including organic soils restoration and reforestation,
all more cost-effective than any new energy production.

The figure obviously isn’t perfect, because it includes
biofuels, which are a great way to degrade land,
and nuclear, without the numerous costs such as spent fuel storage.
But it nonetheless gives an interesting spectrum.

Finally, writing about the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia:

For the economies along this corridor, there is a huge opportunity
to leapfrog traditional approaches to developing energy systems,
moving immediately to cutting edge technologies, more cost-efficient
and decentralised systems, and applying more innovative approaches
to finance these developments.

Here in the sunny U.S. southeast, at the same latitude as North Africa
and with similar issues of poor rural populations, there’s no reason
we can’t leapfrog as well, and profit by doing so.

-jsq