SHIFTING GEARS IN SAUDI ARABIA119the ranks. He grew up in fog- shrouded Abha, a remote mountaintop
town near the Yemeni border, and left to study electrical engineering at
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. KFUPM is a master-
work of the 1970s brutalist architecture style that was in vogue across
the Mideast during the first oil boom. The university sits at the base of
the dome- shaped hill in Dhahran crowned by the Saudi Aramco
headquarters. The school feeds a constant stream of graduates up the
rocky hill into Aramco and to ministries dealing with oil, electricity, and
water.
Al- Shehri didn’t take the trip up the hill. Striving for a keener under-
standing of the power systems he would one day help restructure, al-
Shehri sought his graduate degree at Oregon State University, a world
away from the Aramco campus, a place where near- constant rainfall fed
trees that soared higher than any building then constructed in the king-
dom. Al- Shehri returned home in 1985 with a PhD in electrical engi-
neering, starting his career at a time when power infrastructure was still
being built out. Al- Shehri taught at his alma mater, KFUPM, and even-
tually became dean of graduate studies. It was when he was appointed
governor of the kingdom’s electricity and water regulator, the Electric-
ity and Co- Generation Regulatory Authority of Saudi Arabia (ECRA),
that he began informing ruling elites about the kingdom’s self- destructive
practices.
Al- Shehri, alarmed by the public’s increasing thirst for the kingdom’s
main export commodity, became an advocate for subsidy reform as a
way to reduce the kingdom’s runaway energy demand. The 1999 reform
that he engineered had a tiered tariff structure that reserved high prices
for upper levels of consumption to nudge wealthy Saudis to find ways to
avoid waste. “There aren’t many people who are consuming more than
10,000 kWh a month, but they are the ones with the flexibility to reduce
their consumption without sacrificing their comfort,” al- Shehri told me
over tea in the 1970s- era Dhahran International Hotel, among a lobby
full of thobe- wearing men stubbing cigarettes into giant brass ashtrays.
Figures from 2016 back this up, showing that over 50 percent of house-
holds use less than 2,000 kWh per month, while only 2.4 percent use
more than 8,000.^6 Improving efficiency is a relatively simple matter. For