The incumbent: a gas-fired grid
The baseline solar must beat. Bahrain's electricity is almost entirely natural gas — dependable and cheap to the consumer, but carbon-heavy and propped up by subsidies that quietly distort the whole transition.
How it works
Natural gas is burned in combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT): a gas turbine drives a generator, and its waste heat raises steam for a second turbine — which is why CCGT is the most efficient way to burn gas for power. The electricity then flows through the EWA transmission and distribution grid to homes and businesses, where in summer the dominant load is air-conditioning.
Figure 3Gas-to-grid system. Continuous, controllable output — at a continuous carbon cost. Sourced emissions factor [3].
Technical profile
Gas is the incumbent for good engineering reasons: it is dispatchable (output can be ramped to match demand, including the brutal summer A/C peak), mature, and reliable, with firm capacity available day and night. Its weaknesses are strategic rather than operational: it depends on a finite fossil fuel and locks in carbon for the life of each plant.
Dispatchable & firm · proven at grid scale · matches the afternoon cooling peak · no weather dependence.
Fossil fuel → continuous CO₂ · finite resource · fossil lock-in for 25–30 yr plant lifetimes.
Economic profile — and the subsidy distortion
On an unsubsidised levelised basis, gas now costs about US$76/MWh [2] Sourced — and crucially, more than utility-scale solar (Entry 4). So why does gas still dominate? Because in Bahrain the price the consumer sees is not the cost of generation. Subsidised citizens pay just 3 fils/kWh on their first 3,000 units, while unsubsidised and expatriate users pay 32 fils/kWh [9] Sourced.
Artificially cheap electricity lengthens the payback on any private investment in solar: if grid power costs the household almost nothing, the savings from self-generation are small, so the incentive to switch is weak — even where the sun is abundant. The subsidy, not the sunshine, is the binding economic constraint. This is revisited as an equity issue in Entry 7.
Environmental profile
The dominant impact is operational carbon. Burning gas for power emits on the order of 490 gCO₂eq/kWh on a lifecycle basis (IPCC range 410–650) [3] Sourced — emitted continuously, every hour the plant runs. There are also upstream methane losses and local combustion emissions. Unlike solar's footprint, none of this is front-loaded into manufacturing; it accrues for the entire operating life.
Baseline summary
Gas sets a baseline that is reliable and politically cheap, but carbon-heavy (~490 g/kWh) and economically dependent on subsidy. Solar must beat that on carbon and unsubsidised cost — which it does on paper. The real contest is what dust does to solar's field performance, measured next.
Viva readiness
If solar is cheaper per MWh, why is the grid still ~100% gas?▾
Three reasons: dispatchability (gas is firm, solar is variable and needs storage to match the evening peak); sunk fossil infrastructure; and the subsidy that hides the true cost of grid power, weakening the private case for solar. The Lazard figure is unsubsidised utility-scale — real-world Bahrain economics are distorted by the 3-fils tariff.
Where does your 490 g/kWh figure come from, and how firm is it?▾
It is the IPCC AR5 lifecycle median for combined-cycle gas, with a published range of 410–650 g/kWh depending on plant efficiency and upstream methane. I use the median and state the range, rather than a single bare number.