Three companies have signed agreements for project development and sale of solar power with the Egyptian authorities.
According to media reports, Nubian, ARC and Irena have signed agreements with the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company (EETC) to develop solar power projects with cumulative capacity of 125 MW. Two of these projects will likely be the part of Aswan solar power park.
All three projects shall be developed under the first phase of feed-in tariff scheme wherein the tariffs have been set at US¢14.32/kWh. Nubian and ARC will set up projects of 50 MW each at Aswan while Irena, an Egyptian-Iraqi joint venture, will set up a 25 MW project in the West Nile region.
According to the requirements under phase I of the feed-in tariff scheme, project developers ought to bring in 85% of the project investment in foreign currency while the balance 15% shall be Egyptian Pounds.
A number of international project developers are working on a large-scale solar power park at Aswan. Companies that signed project developer agreements include Enel Green, EDF, Access Building Energy, and Building Energy Alliance. Companies that had signed the agreement earlier included TAQA Arabia, Cairo Solar, Orascom, Lekela Power (a joint venture between Mainstream Renewable Power and Actis).
Egypt plans to set up 2 GW wind energy and 2.3 GW solar power capacity by 2022. It also plans to increase the share of renewable energy in the electricity market to 20% by the same year.
The Ministry of Electricity and Energy recently announced that it will reduced the feed-in tariffs for solar power projects as part of the phase II of the feed-in tariff program. Projects with size of 500 kW to 20 MW will now have feed-in tariffs of US¢7.8/kWh, down from US¢13.6/kWh while projects of size 20-50 MW will see feed-in tariffs fall from US¢14.0/kWh to US¢8.4/kWh. These tariffs will be applicable to the second phase solar power projects implementation.
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