The Roof and the Strait
On Sunday Gulf News reported that the International Energy Agency expects the United Arab Emirates to become the world’s largest producer of solar electricity per person by 2031. It is a story about the sun. Read in the Gulf this year, it is really a story about a strait. Oil must be shipped through a narrow place. Sunlight need not be.
[https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/energy/2026/11/07/uae-to-become-worlds-biggest-generator-of-solar-electricity-by-2031-iea-says/]
The IEA’s numbers are striking. Its Renewables 2026 report projects that the UAE will generate more than 4,000 kilowatt hours of solar electricity for every resident by 2031, against a projected global average of about 800. Australia comes second, Oman third and Qatar fifth. Last year, by the think tank Ember’s count, the Emirates managed roughly 1,400 kilowatt hours a head, so the forecast implies close to a threefold rise in six years. A measure per person flatters a small population on a large desert. The direction is still unmistakable, and this year has supplied the reason.
Most of the oil the Gulf sells abroad must leave through the Strait of Hormuz, a channel that normally carries about a fifth of the world’s oil consumption. Since regional war broke out on 28 February, traffic through it has been severely restricted, and Gulf exporters have learned what a single chokepoint costs. A barrel of crude needs safe passage to reach a customer. A photon falling on Al Dhafra has no strait to cross.
That is the quiet lesson of the Gulf’s solar boom. Oil wealth is hostage to geography; electricity made at home is not. Solar is no fortress. Chinese module imports into six regional states, the UAE among them, fell by 61 per cent in the first three quarters of this year, and a field of panels can be hit by a drone. But a field spread over thousands of hectares is a poorer target than a single laden ship in a narrow channel.
Israel should recognise this argument, because it made it first.
In 1949 David Ben-Gurion offered Harry Zvi Tabor, a London born physicist, a post on the new state’s Research Council. Fuel was so short in the austerity years that the government banned heating water between ten in the morning and six in the evening. Tabor’s answer was a selective black surface that soaked up the sun’s heat without radiating it away, the heart of the dud shemesh, the rooftop tank that still crowns most Israeli homes. In 1980 Israel became the first country to write solar water heating into its building law. Roughly nine in ten Israeli homes now heat their water this way.
Then the country drifted. Offshore gas made electricity cheap and Israel an exporter. By the end of 2025 renewables supplied only about 16 per cent of its electricity, against a target of 30 per cent by 2030. When the war began, the Energy Ministry shut the Leviathan and Karish platforms for fear of missile strikes. Leviathan stayed dark for 32 days. Israel kept its lights on by burning more coal and, at peaks, diesel, while gas exports to Egypt and Jordan dried up. The nation that put the sun on its roofs found itself guarding steel platforms in the sea.
Which brings us to the most sensible idea of the Abraham Accords era. In November 2021, at Expo Dubai, Israel, Jordan and the UAE signed a declaration of intent for what became Project Prosperity. An Emirati financed solar plant of 600 megawatts, with storage, would rise in the Jordanian desert and sell its power to Israel. Israel would desalinate up to 200 million cubic metres of Mediterranean water a year for Jordan, one of the driest countries on earth. In November 2023, with Gaza at war, Amman said it would not sign.
A year ago Kan reported that Jordanian officials were signalling interest in reviving the deal as the kingdom’s water crisis deepened. Hormuz should settle the argument. Here is a trade in sunlight and seawater, neither of which passes through a chokepoint any navy can close. Jordan has the land. Israel has the desalination know how. The Emirates, about to lead the world in solar output per head, has the capital.
The objection is obvious. Interdependence is also exposure. A Jordanian government under pressure from the street could switch off the power; an Israeli one could shut the tap. But Israel already lives with a grid that leans on platforms within range of hostile missiles. The question is never whether a system can be hit, but how many places it must be hit, and who pays. A swap in which Amman forfeits water if it cuts the power, and Jerusalem forfeits power if it cuts the water, gives both capitals a reason to keep the lights on.
Oil made the Gulf rich and its waters a battlefield, because wealth that travels by sea can be held at a narrow place. Sunlight falls on Abu Dhabi and Amman and Arad alike, and no one can blockade it. The Emirates appears to have grasped this. Israel grasped it in 1949, then let the lesson lapse on a tide of cheap gas.
On almost any flat roof in Jerusalem, a black tank sits beside the washing lines. Nobody needs to climb up there. The flat below can stand empty all through the working day. The water is hot anyway.