Egyptian government aims to achieve 7 GW of wind energy by 2022

The Spanish company Global Energy Services (GES) has announced that it will start construction of a wind farm in Egypt before the end of 2018. The plant will be located 25 km from Ras Ghareb, a town in the Red Sea governorate (Gulf of Suez). It will have a production capacity of 263 MW.

In the coming weeks, GES will assemble 125 wind turbines, each with a production capacity of 2.1 MW. The energy produced will then be sold to Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company (EETC), the public company responsible for electricity transmission and distribution, which will first negotiate a power purchase agreement (PPA) with GES. The company, which employs more than 700 people, should also take care of the maintenance of this park, which is the result of the Benaban programme, named after a small village in the Nile near the Aswan hydroelectric plant. The objective of the programme is to encourage private companies to invest in renewable energy in Egypt, more precisely under the “Build-Own-and-Operate” model, i.e. to build, own and operate. It is in fact a specific model of public-private partnership (PPP).

Through the initiative, the Egyptian government aims to achieve a production capacity of 7 GW of wind energy by 2022. An ambition that can be achieved, especially since the country is teeming with wind energy projects. In the Gulf of Suez, where the GHG project, Acwa Power, is located, a Saudi company will build a 500 MW wind farm. Feasibility studies are underway. The project would be carried out by the Japanese company Marubeni Corporation, which will start work in 2020.

Also in this region, blown by the Red Sea wind, a consortium of companies is building a 250 MW wind farm, expandable to 500 MW. These are the French company Engie, the Japanese Toyota Tsusho Corporation and the Egyptian Orascom Construction. Together, the three companies will invest $400 million. The feed-in tariff has not yet been negotiated between the three companies and EETC. It will probably be in 2020, before the wind farm is commissioned.