The weather inside the machine
The question is whether the planning system can learn fast enough from what Ibri and Manah are teaching it, and feed those lessons into the next wave of projects before contracts are signed and designs are frozen.
Published: 04:04 PM,Apr 22,2026 | EDITED : 08:04 PM,Apr 22,2026
The wind at Manah does not care about design standards. This kept coming back to me after moderating last week’s Oman Climate Dialogue on renewable energy, where we had the regulator, the procurer, the private sector operator, and the institution responsible for accountability all on stage together.
We tend to talk about renewable energy deployment as if the main variables are financial and political. Can you secure the financing? Can you sign the power purchase agreement? Can you build the grid connection in time? These are real questions, and they shaped much of the evening. Renewables on the national grid went from just over 4 per cent to nearly 10 in a single year. A gigawatt of solar came online at Manah. Battery storage is being bundled into a project for the first time at Ibri. A wind turbine factory is under construction in Duqm. To reach 30 per cent renewable electricity by 2030, Oman needs to more than quadruple its current installed capacity in about four years. The pace is no longer speculative, and neither is the distance remaining.
What surfaced more gradually during the panel is the degree to which climate itself is becoming a variable inside the planning of the energy transition meant to respond to it. Solar panels are designed and tested to international standards that assume a set of environmental conditions. The IEC 61215 standard tests panels against wind loads equivalent to roughly 130 to 150 km per hour. At sites like Ibri and Manah, wind speeds regularly approach or exceed the thresholds that affect panel performance, dust accumulation, and the stress on tracking systems. We assume weather patterns at a given site will behave the way the resource assessments predicted. We assume dust will respond to predictable cleaning schedules. We assume the wind at a solar site is a minor variable, when at some Omani locations it is more aggressive than the engineering specifications anticipated. These models were built for temperate geographies and stable weather baselines, and they travel poorly into an interior desert that is getting hotter, dustier, and less predictable.
This matters because Oman does not have the option of waiting for better-adapted technology before deploying at scale. The 2030 targets are four years away. The projects being planned today will operate for twenty years under conditions that the next two decades of climate change will continue to reshape. What gets locked into a feasibility study now, the performance curves, the degradation rates, the maintenance intervals, becomes the baseline against which an entire project is financed, contracted, and evaluated. If those baselines underestimate what the Omani environment actually demands, the gap will show up years later as underperformance that is difficult to attribute and expensive to correct.
During the dialogue, the panelists were direct about this. The things that surprise you at operational scale are rarely the things you modelled for. The question is whether the planning system can learn fast enough from what Ibri and Manah are teaching it, and feed those lessons into the next wave of projects before contracts are signed and designs are frozen.
Oman has made a credible start. The institutions are forming. The projects are generating. The workforce is beginning to take shape, with 321 Omani graduates now training to build wind turbines in a factory that did not exist a year ago. What the next phase requires is something feasibility studies are rarely designed to carry: the willingness to treat operational data from these first projects as planning intelligence for everything that follows.