UAE’s clean energy capacity to exceed 22GW by 2031 to power data-centre surge

Suhail Al Mazrouei suggests revised national capacity for renewable energy

Abu Dhabi's Al Dhafra solar project. The UAE’s installed renewable energy capacity reached 6.8GW by the end of 2024. Bloomberg

Clean energy capacity is expected to exceed 22 gigawatts by 2031 in the UAE as it sharpens focus on renewables to meet increasing demand from data centres, the country's energy and infrastructure minister has said.

Suhail Al Mazrouei told the Emirates Energy Forum in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday that with the additional capacity added by 2031, clean energy would account for "35 per cent of the baseload."

By the end of 2024, the UAE’s installed renewable energy capacity had reached 6.8GW, the Ministry of Energy said. The UAE, an Opec producer, plans to reach net-zero by 2050. Half of its mix will come from clean energy, including nuclear, by the same deadline. The UAE recently updated its 2030 renewable target to 19.8GW from a previous 14.2GW. Mr Al Mazrouei's comments suggest an increased capacity on the back of new data centre-led power demand coming from the planned Stargate project - the artificial intelligence compute cluster being built by G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco, Nvidia and SoftBank Group and requiring a future power capacity of 5GW.

Mr Al Mazrouei said demand for electricity would increase significantly. “The UAE is one of those countries which will be building large-scale data centres and that would require lots of energy baseload – in order to do that, we need to work on our efficiencies,” he said.

"Baseload" refers to the minimum level of electricity demand on a grid that should remain constant, with interrupted supply.

“We need to work on more batteries to smoothen the curve of demand between summer and winter, between different hours of the day, and AI is going to be helping us a lot in that field,” Mr Al Mazrouei said.

Electricity demand across the Middle East and North Africa has tripled since 2000 and is projected to rise by a further 50 per cent by 2035, driven by fast population growth, urbanisation and industrial expansion, the International Energy Agency says. At the same time, the UAE is stepping up investment in energy-intensive data centres and high-performance computing as it seeks to establish itself as a global hub for artificial intelligence.

Suhail Al Mazrouei, Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, says AI will 'improve the way we consume'. Ryan Lim for The National

The UAE is bringing more renewable energy capacity through large-scale projects such as the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park in Dubai. Its initial capacity forecast of 5GW was last month revised to 8GW when completed in 2030.

“AI is going to improve the way we consume," Mr Al Mazrouei said. "It's going to help us in the demand-side management and it's going to improve the efficiency of the whole system, from the generation to the consumption in a house, in a factory, in any institution or consuming building, or even a city.

In October, the UAE also broke ground on a Dh 22 billion ($6 billion) renewable energy project in Al Wathba in Abu Dhabi, which will have a a solar power plant with a battery energy storage system, when operational in 2027.