The global issue of climate change caused by humans and its inextricable linkage to our present and future energy demand presents the biggest challenge facing our globe. Hydrogen has been introduced as a new renewable energy resource. It is envisaged to be a crucial vector in the vast low-carbon transition to mitigate climate change, minimize oil reliance, reinforce energy security, solve the intermittency of renewable energy resources, and ameliorate energy performance in the transportation sector by using it in energy storage, energy generation, and transport sectors. Many technologies have been developed to generate hydrogen. The current paper presents a review of the current and developing technologies to produce hydrogen from fossil fuels and alternative resources like water and biomass. The results showed that reformation and gasification are the most mature and used technologies. However, the weaknesses of these technologies include high energy consumption and high carbon emissions. Thermochemical water splitting, biohydrogen, and photo-electrolysis are long-term and clean technologies, but they require more technical development and cost reduction to implement reformation technologies efficiently and on a large scale. A combination of water electrolysis with renewable energy resources is an ecofriendly method. Since hydrogen is viewed as a considerable game-changer for future fuels, this paper also highlights the challenges facing hydrogen generation. Moreover, an economic analysis of the technologies used to generate hydrogen is carried out in this study.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia set out the national Vision 2030 that aims to accelerate efforts toward attaining sustainable development goals. In the framework of this Vision, Renewable energy plan has been set up and aims to ensure renewable energy growth that presents a key priority for achieving sustainable development. The present paper highlights the current situation of pollution and renewable energy in the Kingdom and presents the policies and actions stipulated in the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 to develop a renewable energy sector. In addition, the barriers facing the implementation of solar and wind energy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been carried out. Also, the different challenges facing the waste management has been presented. The paper concludes with some recommendations to develop the renewable energy sector in the Kingdom.

High temperature is the primary challenge in the development of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in an arid climate. A rise in temperature diminishes the performance of the PV systems and shortens their lifespan. The goal of this manuscript is to develop an analytical model to predict the temperature of PV panels under a passive cooling system for an arid environment. Taking into consideration the link between solar panel temperature and its conversion efficiency, Kirchhoff’s and Ohm’s laws for a complex circuit were applied to calculate the heat flux in the solar panel system, and hence obtain the temperatures of each layer in the system. Closed-form analytical expressions for temperature, output power, and conversion efficiency of the solar panel were deduced and presented as functions of solar irradiance, ambient temperature, emissivity, wind velocity, tilt angle, and dimensions of fins. Comparison between the results presented in the literature and those predicted by the developed analytical model validated the presented model. Moreover, the length of the fins required for safe thermal operation of solar panels in harsh desert environment were also obtained from analysis. Furthermore, the effect of using such a cooling system on the temperature and efficiency of the solar panels was verified by using the developed model under real conditions in Dammam city during summer and winter seasons. The results showed that the optimized heat sink could raise the solar panel power by 8.7% during summer and by 6.5% during winter.