Note, 13 October 2026: IRENA and GWEC count Saudi wind differently. GWEC reports 1,512 MW of Saudi additions in 2025 and 2,324 MW installed at year end; IRENA's table, used here, shows no change. We report IRENA's figures as published.
886 megawatts. That was MENA’s entire wind build in 2025, and Egypt put up 829 of them.
IRENA’s Renewable Capacity Statistics 2026 landed in March with the region’s year-end numbers. Ten MENA markets carry installed wind. Morocco added 57 MW. In IRENA’s table, the other eight, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Algeria and Syria, finished 2025 on exactly the capacity they started it with.
On IRENA’s count the regional fleet stands at 6,943 MW, and Egypt and Morocco hold 79 percent of it. IRENA still records Saudi Arabia at 400 MW, the size of Dumat Al Jandal, and Oman at 50 MW.
Set that against what the Gulf is currently procuring. Saudi Arabia has 2.2 GW of wind moving through NREP Round 7, five and a half times the fleet IRENA records for it.
Next door, IRENA records Türkiye adding 1,910 MW over the same twelve months, more than twice what all of MENA managed.
This looks to me like a sequencing problem. Egypt and Morocco built their fleets over two decades of steady, smaller rounds. The Gulf is standing up a fleet and the machinery that procures one in the same cycle, and right now the procurement half is running well ahead of the steel.
The chart that matters is next year’s. Which market puts up its first full gigawatt in a single year, and does it come from North Africa again?
The data
| Market | End-2024 MW | End-2025 MW | Added 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Egypt | 2,199 | 3,028 | +829 |
| Morocco | 2,395 | 2,452 | +57 |
| Jordan | 631 | 631 | 0 |
| Saudi Arabia | 400 | 400 | 0 |
| Tunisia | 245 | 245 | 0 |
| UAE | 110 | 110 | 0 |
| Oman | 50 | 50 | 0 |
| Kuwait | 12 | 12 | 0 |
| Algeria | 10 | 10 | 0 |
| Syria | 5 | 5 | 0 |
| MENA core total | 6,057 | 6,943 | +886 |
| Türkiye (adjacent) | 12,871 | 14,781 | +1,910 |
Source: IRENA, Renewable Capacity Statistics 2026 (published March 2026), “Wind energy” table, header CAP (MW), printed pp. 14-15.
