Jordan toward a 100% renewable electricity system

Jordan has faced two major energy crises during the past two decades; the disruption of Iraqi's oil in 2003 and Egyptian's natural gas in 2011. Restructuring Jordan's electricity supply system became a national necessity to secure sustainable electricity at affordable prices. In this work, a 100% renewable electricity supply scenario is constructed and compared with three other scenarios, which contain a mix of natural gas, nuclear, oil shale and renewable energy, in terms of techno-economic feasibility, security of supply, and carbon dioxide emissions. All the proposed scenarios were found to be economically feasible. The cumulative discount production costs, over the coming thirty five years under different fuel prices assumption, is less than 80 billion dollars (2010 dollar) for all proposed scenario. In the 100% renewable electricity scenario, the country needs around 10.6 GW of concentrated solar power, 4.5 GW of wind, and 25 GW of photovoltaic to meet the demand in the year 2050 which are achievable in terms of energy resources. The dispatchability problem of the renewable scenario was solved by proposing a 90 GWh storage system (43 CSP plants, 250 MW each, 8 h storage). Furthermore, import dependency and CO2 emission will entirely disappear by 2050 in the renewable scenario.