Kuwait plans to double its power production capacity to more than 20,000 megawatts over the next five years, Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Mohammad al-Ahmad Al-Sabah said on Thursday. Power projects underway in the Gulf emirate will add around 6,400 megawatts of new capacity over the next two years, the prime minister was cited by the official KUNA news agency as telling editors of local dailies on Thursday. The country has also approved other projects that are expected to add 3,600 megawatts of power capacity by the end of 2014, the prime minister added. Kuwait's current production capacity is around 11,000 megawatts. He gave no figures on the cost of the projects, but two years ago the then Electricity and Water minister Mohammad Al-Olaim told parliament the emirate planned to spend $27 billion on power and water projects. The electricity and water ministry said a few months ago that power projects slated for completion in 2011 would cost at least $9 billion. Last month, Kuwait picked General Electric to build a new power generation and water desalination plant in Subbiya, north of the country, at a cost of $2.65 billion to produce 2,000 megawatts of power. This is the first new power plant since 1989, according to Electricity and Water Minister Bader Al-Azemi. Kuwait sells power at subsidized charges to its 1.1 million citizens and 2.35 million foreign residents. Meanwhile, amid the gathering storm over Iran's controversial nuclear ambitions, the race is on among Arab states to build nuclear power plants of their own, opening up immense trade opportunities for the industrialized world as well as the specter of proliferation. The United States, Britain, France and Russia are competing for contracts in the nuclear energy bonanza that is emerging in the Middle East as Arab states seek to generate more power to feed their growing economies and to build desalination plants, a vital element in development plans as water resources shrink. Saudi Arabia's Minister of Water and Electricity, Abdullah Bin Andul-Rahman Al-Hussein, told the Kingdom's Al-Watan newspaper in late August that Riyadh was working on plans for its first nuclear plant. Saudi Arabia and UAEsigned preliminary agreements with the United States for nuclear technology in 2008. In May, France's economy minister, Christine Lagarde, said Paris was close to finalizing a nuclear energy cooperation agreement with the United Arab Emirates. In 2007, France also pledged to help Morocco, a former colony, and Qatar, another of the Gulf states, to develop their nuclear programs. The UAE is the furthest along among the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council - which also includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain - although Riyadh's plans are accelerating. French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited the UAE in May to open France's first military base in the Gulf - and to promote a French consortium's bid to secure a $40 billion deal to build at least four, and possibly six, reactors. The French consortium, which includes Areva, GdF Suez and Total, is the front-runner for the winner-takes-all contract. Other bidders are General Electric of the United States with Hitachi of Japan, and the Korea Electric Power Corp. with Hyundai Engineering and Samsung C&T Corp. In Egypt, energy demand is growing by 7 percent a year. Even the Gulf states are suffering power cuts these days. The UAE hopes to have its first nuclear plant online by 2015, although industry sources say that may be way too optimistic. It takes on average eight years - and $4 billion - to construct a reactor plant. Two years ago, there was little interest in nuclear energy around the Arab world. But now that's all changed. Apart from the six Gulf states, Tunisia, Libya, Jordan, Egypt and even impoverished Yemen are also committed to pursuing nuclear energy programs. “The rules have changes,” King Abdullah II of Jordan recently told Israeli daily Haaretz. “Everybody's going for nuclear programs.” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a deal in 2008 that cleared the way for Russian involvement in building four nuclear power plants in the Arab world's most populous nation. The first, on the Mediterranean coast, is expected to cost $1.5 billion.
