As 2024 draws to a close, it’s a familiar story for Kuwait’s power sector. A failure to bring new generation capacity online leaves it in a precarious position. Indeed, the combination of increased demand and a drop in capacity meant that Kuwait was forced to implement rolling power cuts in August to avoid a grid meltdown, even while importing record amounts of electricity from fellow GCC states.
With Kuwait’s government showing no appetite to implement price reforms to tackle demand, capacity additions should be a major priority. Yet the pipeline of projects to add capacity is perilously thin, and Kuwait’s aging power generation fleet actually lost capacity this year (MEES, 30 August). At best, an additional 250MW of new capacity looks viable for 2025, but it will be a struggle to bring even this online in time for the peak summer demand period. (CONTINUED - 1230 WORDS)
