Who is preventing Palestinian factories from switching to clean energy to reduce production inputs?

Screenwriter: Hussein Hijaz

Solar energy is considered one of the promising solutions to reduce the input costs of Palestinian factory production, but it faces a series of technical, economic, environmental, geographical, political, social, legal and regulatory challenges. In the absence of a comprehensive strategy and a positive legal environment, Palestinian industry, bound by the apartheid system, is unable to benefit from this important tributary and thus improve its competitiveness. Unfortunately, many Palestinian industrialists have a stereotype that ensuring continuous electricity demand focuses on investments by monopoly distribution companies to produce clean energy or importing more energy from the occupied territories, Jordan or Egypt.

In this article, I will try to draw attention to this issue by raising a series of questions that could serve as leverage for a unified effort to remove barriers to solar energy use in Palestinian industry and develop a national strategy to encourage factories to switch to solar energy.

1. Does the Energy Department have legislation, laws, and incentives in place to regulate and support factories using solar energy to produce electricity?

2. Does the Energy Authority have uniform laws or standards for service providers and municipalities to apply to Palestinian factories?

3. Is the price of energy produced by the net metering system uniform for all service companies? After the construction of all system requirements is completed, the partial purchase price of the net metering system production volume reaches 21 yuan (excluding tax) per kilowatt (with a payback period of 9 years, which is not economically feasible).

4. Will obtaining a permit for the plant to install a clean energy system be affected by bureaucratic procedures or administrative hurdles?

5. Is there scientific and technical evidence to support the municipal distribution company’s refusal to allow the plant to obtain the necessary solar permit?

6. Is the price of electricity produced by industry fairly uniform across cities’ net metering systems?

7. Are distribution companies the main competitors of plants that plan to produce clean energy for internal use?

8. Would granting solar production licenses to companies provide the same value as factories in terms of jobs and economic impact?

9. Why don’t distribution companies or municipalities provide appropriate technical solutions for each region to mutually benefit the factories?

10. Is there a standardized infrastructure and accurate, updated and single-reference information on the Palestinian electricity grid and its indicators?

11. How do the Ministry of Industry and Finance, the Energy Bureau and related agencies support factories in using solar energy?

12. What percentage of electricity currently consumed in Palestine comes from clean energy? Did you know that the international agreement to which the State of Palestine (as part of the Mediterranean Basin countries) has committed requires it to obtain 30% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 in order to protect the environment?

13. How to protect Palestinian solar projects from freezing rain?