Dubai, UAE, 10 July 2018: As the GCC region moves towards a new era of renewable energy development, paving the way for more modern interconnection infrastructure, network expansion and new technologies, Dr Floris Hendrikus Schulze, Managing Director and Head, CESI Middle East, stressed that quality assurance and control will be of the utmost importance to monitor the quality of the components and supply “to avoid the region being flooded by low quality parts and related problems”. He said, “The industry is relatively new and it needs to maintain an international standard in order to be taken seriously by the rest of the world, particularly as it looks to supply electrical power to Africa, Asia and beyond.”

In addition to quality, Dr Schulze stresses the importance of integration of renewables into the grid. “This has been, and still is, a key issue all over the world,” he said, “and will also be a very important challenge in the GCC [region] when connecting vast amounts of renewables to the GCC grid.”

Dr Schulze stressed that solutions for main challenges can be divided into two complementary categories. Effective and affordable technology solutions, he said, is one, as it will help decrease or eliminate these challenges and [bring about] appropriate policies. Regulation and market design, he said, also play a fundamental role in both development of variable renewables and their efficient integration in electricity systems. Dr Schulze added that owing to the unique nature of each and every countries’ power systems, a holistic and long-term approach to system design is key.

Hannah Jo Uy is Assistant Editor at Climate Control Middle East magazine. She may be contacted at hannah@cpi-industry.com