The World Bank will lend $220 million to Egypt’s wind power development project which is planned to make up more than half of the country’s renewable energy generation by 2020.
The project, part of Egypt’s renewable energy strategy, involves creating infrastructure and business models that will scale up wind power projects in the wind resource-endowed country.
Using parts of the loan, Egypt will develop electricity transmission infrastructure that will connect wind farms to the national network.
It will also support the construction and development of a 250-megawatt wind project in the Gulf of Suez and Gabel El-Zait, a first in the country.
The loan is the first Clean Technology Fund-supported project in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The fund, one of the United Nations’ global climate investment initiatives, will provide $150 million. Last year, the bank provided $28 million in grants to Egypt’s wind sector.
Egypt has a 20 percent renewable energy target by 2020. Of this target, 12 percent is planned to be sourced from wind farms.
Egypt is gunning for large-scale clean energy projects to serve regional and national goals of reducing fossil fuel use, protecting the environment, transferring technology and generating green jobs.
Egypt aims to curb greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent towards 2020.
“One of the outcomes of this project is to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions through facilitating the development of clean energy resources which will result in displacing thermal generation,” said Chandrasekar Govindarajalu of the World Bank. The bank has 186 member countries and is made up of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Association.
“Furthermore, the project has several elements that make a strong case for replicability. The Egyptian experience, being the most extensive in the region, will be applicable for many of the other MENA countries,” he said.
Egypt, which reportedly has one of the world’s best wind resources, allocated 630,000 hectares of government land for wind farms last year. The Gulf of Suez alone boasts of about 7,200 MW of potential wind power that can be developed by 2022.
