While the appetite for the use of sustainable energy in public buildings is encouraging, bureaucratic, technical and financial factors threaten wider uptake of these technologies.
The examples in Table 2 show the clear desire for energy efficiency and renewable energy in public facilities, but each of the pilots and projects has faced obstacles and challenges. The Inter-Ministry Committee members, project partners and implementers identified several critical interlinking barriers:
- Ministries are often unable to locate where inefficiencies and wastage occur;
- Difficult collaboration between ministries and agencies, due to the distribution of responsibilities and benefits;
- A lack of transparency in bill payments, as well as uncertainties about where savings could accrue and how they could be used;
- The inability of some ministries to access and manage finance or to contract the private sector;
- The requirement of banks for repayment guarantees in order to provide capital;
- Bureaucratic delays, particularly relating to project approvals, solar connection and maintenance needs, all of which could reduce the value of systems;
- The unwillingness of distribution companies to connect solar PV to the grid when a building has unpaid electricity bills;
- Inconsistent and ad hoc quality assurance criteria for technical applications;
- Difficulty in evaluation of performance and savings over time, due to a lack of system digitization and monitoring;
- Systems falling into disrepair when short-term (2–3 years) project maintenance contracts run out.
Some of these issues are illustrated in the following sections with regard to schools and hospitals. Overall, there are three important considerations for more financially sustainable scale-up of renewable energy: the redistribution of savings; tackling approval delays; and quality control, monitoring and maintenance.
How generated savings are used or redistributed
The Ministry of Finance allocates budgets to government ministries, which are responsible for the costs of utilities. Sometimes, these expenses go unpaid. In these instances, savings on electricity costs resulting from the use of renewable energy would first go to covering existing deficits. As a result, those managing public buildings may feel no tangible benefit of installing solar heating and PV panels. This situation may offer little initial incentive for schools and hospitals to upgrade their energy supplies, and could prevent the development of commercial models that would pay for investments through the savings generated over several years.
As one Jordanian expert put it: ‘We know we can reach 100 per cent savings on electricity in schools, but who can make use of the savings? … donors [are] asking for advocacy on this issue.’
Increasingly, donors are scrutinizing how their money is used to reduce aid dependence and stimulate Jordan’s economy. For example, in order to finance efficiency measures and renewable energy, funders want to know how savings on electricity bills will lead to one or more of the following objectives: financially sustainable scale-up of energy efficiency and renewable energy, benefits for vulnerable people (e.g. for improved health and education outcomes), the possibility for the institution in question to enhance its infrastructure, or reduced national utility debt.
Increasingly, donors are scrutinizing how their money is used to reduce aid dependence and stimulate Jordan’s economy.
There are precedents for effective use of renewable technology that offer potential solutions to incentivize those in charge of public buildings. The use of renewable energy and energy efficiency measures in mosques and churches (see Box 3) demonstrates that it is possible to encourage organic scale-up when building managers are in charge of the payment of electricity bills. These managers have an incentive to make savings, which they can allocate elsewhere, such as repaying other existing debts. This case also shows that it is possible to overcome the problem of unpaid electricity bills through coordination between government agencies. The innovative South Amman solar PV project, which was designed to reduce bills for Ministry of Health hospitals and humanitarian agencies, provides a template – to be tested – for how savings might be redistributed (see Table 2 and Chapter 6).
Approval delays for grid connection
Jordan’s net metering regulations allow solar PV to contribute to bill savings by generating electricity that is fed into the national grid. However, approvals for connecting newly installed PV projects to the electricity grid can take time and reduce the overall value of such installations. For example, while panels were installed in October 2018 at Al-Mafraq Hospital, it took a further five months to connect them to the grid. The electricity distribution companies are responsible for connections, and have a number of requirements that must be met before they approve the connection, including grid-impact studies.
Approvals for grid connection face several conditions, most importantly the distribution companies will often demand that entities repay debts owed to electricity distribution companies before transitioning to a renewable energy system (although the rule is not hard and fast, and it can be overcome with government intervention as shown in Box 3). In the case of Jordan’s drive to install PV on public buildings, if the targeted buildings have accumulated energy debts, investments for the upgrades are unlikely to be forthcoming. In an Inter-Ministry Committee meeting in 2019, it was pointed out that many solar panels installed on schools were not yet connected because the Ministry of Education had not paid outstanding bills. The same is true for some health facilities.
Quality control, monitoring and maintenance
The value of projects will be lost if equipment is low quality, poorly installed or if responsibility for maintenance is not delegated and resourced. Accountability is a frequent problem in public building projects.
As of 2019, new legislation meant that all renewable energy applications of over 20MW must be approved by the Jordan Engineering Association (JEA). This was a welcome development for ensuring standards. However, quality control checks for other elements of efficiency and energy services are still lacking. In the past, problems have occurred when renewable energy applications were performed and overseen by unqualified persons. New laws and regulations now mean that design and supervision must be separated from procurement and implementation to remove any conflict of interest. The Energy and Minerals Regulatory Commission (EMRC) approves licences for specific renewable energy projects. The developer must be a company registered with the JEA, which audits the blueprints and calculations as well as the buildings themselves. The main goal is to have integrated, workable projects that combine efficiency aspects such as thermal insulation. The JEA is also working on the digitization of auditing, which is now compulsory to increase efficiency and effectiveness. There has been little time to test this arrangement as the government temporarily suspended approvals for new renewable energy projects of over 1MW between 2019 and mid-2022, due to insufficient grid capacity, and the combination of high contracted thermal power costs and lower than expected demand – which meant the utilities were making a loss – partly due to the uptake of renewable energy in the commercial sector.
Careful planning and coordination between public facilities and ministries is vital. Lack of coordination between the Ministry of Education and schools has previously hindered monitoring. For example, as part of the first project installing solar panels on schools in Jordan, in 2016–17, NRC provided schools with computer equipment to monitor the installation and send information directly to the ministry. However, when the ministry changed its IP address the monitoring was disrupted.
Unlike the Al-Bashir Hospital solar project, the Al-Mafraq Hospital project did not include the option of a remote monitoring system as this function was to be carried out through the main Ministry of Health IT system, Hakeem. This was intended to reduce costs and to better integrate the project within the Ministry of Health system. However, the Ministry of Health did not grant the private installation company, Millennium Energy Industries, access to its system, which limited responses to faults during the maintenance warranty period. In February 2019, the project was once again disrupted when the Ministry of Health asked the installers to remove the solar water heating system in order to undertake roof repairs (the responsibility of the Ministry of Public Works and Housing). The repairs to the roof were not completed until 2021, which significantly impacted the use of the system and its value. In October 2021, with work completed, the hospital’s own maintenance team reinstalled the solar system and it is now reported to be fully operational albeit without remote monitoring.
Both Al-Bashir and Al-Mafraq hospitals should be generating useful data on actual diesel savings from use of the solar water heating systems. However, in Al-Mafraq’s case, the hospital operations and maintenance (O&M) team did not reconnect the control system properly and, at the time of writing, the Al-Bashir Hospital system is not recording savings after the O&M team adjusted system settings.
