Renewable Energy readiness assessment for North African countries

If Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs) are this century´s breakthrough leading to a cleaner future with reduced burning of fossil fuels and emissions, and to the social, economic and political autonomy of countries that currently rely on oil exporting countries, then what is the world waiting for to fully adopt these technologies? Apart from the competitive prices of conventional energy, implementing any technology on the national level is a lengthy process that relies on the adopting country´s capacity to draw a strategy and its capabilities to implement it. In light of the various initiatives proposed to turn North Africa into a renewable energy producer and extend its electricity supply to its neighboring European counties, such as the DESERTEC and the TRANSGREEN/Medgrid initiatives and the Mediterranean Solar Plan (MSP), the objective of this paper is to investigate North Africa regions readiness to deploy large scale RET projects. To do so, we need to first identify the critical factors that are important for the RE diffusion to assess the Renewable Energy Readiness (RE-Readiness) of countries, namely Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, South Sudan, Sudan and Western Sahara. Such factors are defined and assessed in this paper along the three pillars: Human Capital, Infrastructure and Institutions. This assessment identifies the gaps found for the deployment of RETs in these countries and will serve as a first step towards proposing renewable energy diffusion strategies that will contribute to their environmental, social and economic development.