Egyptian manufacturing company Elsewedy Electric is to start work on a 50MW project in Egypt’s Benban province, the latest in a string of solar deals in the country.
Elsewedy has incorporated a new subsidiary dubbed the Egyptian Company for Solar Energy Development (ECSED) with a $75 million investment to develop, finance, build and operate a 50MW solar farm in Aswan, 800km south of Cairo.
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The farm is to be built on land allocated to Egypt’s New and Reneable Energy Authority (NREA) and all energy generated by the project will be sold to the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company at a price of US$0.1434p/kWh under a 25-year PPA guaranteed by the country’s Ministry of Finance.
ECSED has signed a memorandum of understanding with the NREA in order to gain access to the site to conduct preliminary studies, which is to be followed by an infrastructure agreement, a network connection contract and the PPA under Egypt’s sequential development process laid out by the country’s Ministry of Electricity and Renewable Energy.
The project will take the total capacity of Elsewedy’s renewable energy pipeline in Egypt to 650MW and comes amidst a host of other activity in the country in recent weeks.
Last week Mainstream Renewable Power and Actis joint venture Lekela Power announced it had signed an MoU to develop a 50MW solar farm also in Aswan, and in early May Egypt’s government signed off on 220MW of solar projects to be constructed by developers such as Orascom Construction, Alfanar and Sun Infinite.
Egypt hopes to have 2.3GW of solar capacity installed by 2018 and has established a feed-in tariff regime to encourage development of solar and wind energy projects, however solar’s allocation has been oversubscribed twice over.