Green Energy to Grow, Not for Show: Watch Syria’s Assad Launch Brand New Solar Farm

Once enjoying modest self-sufficiency in oil and gas, the Syrian Arab Republic has been thrust into a painful energy crisis by Daesh*, the United States and its Syrian Kurdish allies, who established a chokehold over 90 percent of the nation’s energy-rich regions, and proceeded to systematically loot them.

Syrian President Bashar Assad inaugurated a brand new solar energy farm in a suburb of Damascus this week, with the facility and others like it expected to help the country in its efforts to restore energy independence.

“If we want to talk about the conditions of war and the conditions of siege, any new economic development project, whether it is small, medium or large, any facility, regardless of its size, that has been able to withstand these harsh conditions for 12 years is a challenge in itself,” Assad said, speaking to reporters in Adra Industrial City.

The first 18,000 solar panels in the project have been connected to the national power grid. When completed, the facility is expected to generate about 100 megawatts of electricity. It is being operated under a new private-public model of investment cooperation.

“All sectors are important…but electricity in particular, especially in circumstances of the shortage of electricity production in Syria, is the sector that enters and raises all others,” Assad said. “So what is required of us as the state is to support such projects, because of their importance, and to support the new way of thinking about how we can support investment and how the private sector can be an effective contributor to the economy,” he added.

Assad stressed that for Syria, green sources of energy like solar power are not an “alternative to traditional energy,” but an “auxiliary” that has become possible thanks to technological advances.

Damascus intends to generate up to 2,000 megawatts of electricity using solar power by the year 2030, and the state has offered businesses interest-free loans and other forms of support, including access to the nation’s electrical transmission and distribution grids, which are state-owned.

“For us in Syria, we at the state level still support traditional energy at the level of the public sector. A few months ago, one of the turbines at the Aleppo [power] station was rehabilitated. There are also stations in the process of rehabilitation that will return to production within months and perhaps the coming years, depending on the ability to provide spare parts. But going toward alternative energy is a strategic choice whose effect will be cumulative, and not sudden and rapid, as is the case with conventional energy,” the president said.

Assad encouraged the private sector to explore alternative energy solutions, including solar and wind. “The state can be a partner by buying this energy and selling it at a subsided price to the consumer,” he said.

Electricity Deficit

Syria had an electricity generation capacity of about 41,000 GWh before the beginning of the foreign-backed civil conflict in the country in 2011. Capacity declined to about 25,700 GWh in 2020, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

Notwithstanding the decade-long security crisis in the country, 95 percent of the population continues to have access to electricity, but per capita consumption has declined to just 15 percent of 2010 levels, according to a recent United Nations report. Shortages have limited the number of hours that electricity is available, and impacted households, hospitals, schools and street lighting, with rural areas bearing the brunt of the crisis. They have also meant reduced access to clean, safe drinking water, access to emergency telecommunications and logistics, access to education, as well as food security and agriculture – reducing the quantity, quality and diversity of food production and driving up prices.

Much of the energy infrastructure in the heavily populated western areas of the country has been damaged or destroyed in fighting between government forces, and foreign-backed rebels and jihadist militants between 2012 and 2018.

In the eastern areas of the country – home to 90 percent of the country’s crude oil and natural gas production, Daesh controlled this energy wealth between 2014 and 2017 before being replaced by US troops and their Syrian Kurdish ‘Syrian Democratic Forces’ allies. US forces and the SDF have engaged in a systematic campaign of looting Syria’s oil, illegally smuggling convoys of dozens of oil tankers at a time out of the country several times a week by driving them into neighboring Iraq.

The theft of the country’s energy resources has forced Damascus to depend on Iranian supplies – with the Islamic Republic setting up tanker ship convoys carrying crude oil and gasoline to Syria. Occasionally, these tankers are subjected to piracy and sabotage attacks, with Israeli media boasting that Tel Aviv has disrupted “billions of dollars” worth of energy deliveries from Iran to the fuel-starved nation.

* Daesh (IS/ISIS/ISIL) is a terrorist group outlawed in Russia and many other countries.