Realizing renewable resilience: Lessons from the Middle East for the global energy transition

Maintaining reliable energy supplies with resilience to extreme weather, water shortage and rising electricity and cooling demand is crucial to successfully implementing the clean energy transition. The integrated power and water systems found in several hyper-arid countries, featuring cooling-driven electrical demand and near-total dependence on seawater desalination, offer case studies illustrating energy system robustness to these conditions. We use linear optimization to minimize costs in a model system based on the resiliency-oriented energy system of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) while progressively decarbonizing the energy mix. We demonstrate that high levels of renewable energy adoption are economically favorable under conservative future technology cost assumptions, even including strict resiliency requirements, and draw conclusions for other energy systems making the transition to renewable energy under challenging climatic conditions, especially regarding the role of water desalination, demand flexibility, energy storage, and suitability of conventional design rules for ensuring resilience in renewable-dominated systems.