The state-owned Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy (Masen) has opened the third tender of its solar-plus-storage Noor Midelt project.
Noor Midelt III is seeking a developer to build a 400MW solar PV plant along with a 400MWh battery energy storage system (BESS).
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Once completed, the combined capacity of the Noor Midelt projects will add 1.6GW of solar capacity to Morocco’s electricity generation and will help towards the country’s goal of reaching a 52% share of renewables by 2030.
The first project was also a hybrid one combining 600MW of solar PV with 190MW of concentrated solar power (CSP) and a minimum of 5-hour storage. Noor Midelt II which was launched last month comprises a 400MW solar PV plant with a minimum of 2-hours BESS.
Deadline for proposal submissions is set to Friday 20 October 2023, the successful bidder will enter into a 30-year power purchase agreement (PPA) between Masen as the off-taker – and provide the land lease for the project to be built on – and the company developing the project.
Morocco is setting itself to be one of the leading countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to develop utility-scale solar PV with a pipeline of more than 13GW of capacity (as of June 2022), only behind Oman. The country is also home to a multi-gigawatt hybrid solar and storage project, developed by Xlinks, that expects to export the electricity produced to the UK via an underwater cable connecting both countries.
Moreover, the country’s proximity to Europe will put it in a good position to be an important market for the production of green hydrogen to be exported to Europe and support the European Union’s target of importing 10 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen by 2030.
News reports say that Masen last week shortlisted six bidders for the preceding Noor Midelt II project. They are all large international independent power producers (IPPs): ACWA Power, Grupo Cobra, EDF Renouvelables, International Power, Iberdrola Renovables International and Enel Green Power.
Masen currently has 4.4GW of renewable capacity – solar, wind and hydropower – installed in Morocco.
For more coverage on this tender, you can read a more detailed article on our sister site Energy-storage.news.