Luxor4u

On Sunday, Egypt's Investment and International Cooperation Minister Sahar Nasr announced that Egypt aims to increase its renewable energy by 22 percent come 2020. The announcement was made during a meeting with Norway's Scatec Solar Morten Langsholdt, who agreed to invest $500 million in October to develop 40 solar power plants in Aswan's Benban village.

The proposed plan by Norway's Scatec aims to complete the 40 solar power plants capable of producing 1,800 megawatts by 2018. The $500 million earmarked for the project is expected to be received in October and is the latest instance of a renewable energy company to recognise the potential growth in Egypt's renewable energy market.

According to Nasr, Langsholdt, as well as a number of investors including the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) have expressed interest in investing $3 billion into Egypt's Solar Feed-in Tariff programme.


http://www.cairoscene.com/Business/500- ... t-in-Aswan

This is good news as long as no Egyptians are involved in the installation, they will spend most of their time looking where to plug them in.

I hope the investors have factored in the cost of the small army which will be needed to guard the panels.

Why Aswan rather than some part of the country that needs more electricity? Transmission costs and losses would be much lower if the cells were located further north, so long as they were in a sunny area.

Brian Yare wrote:Why Aswan rather than some part of the country that needs more electricity? Transmission costs and losses would be much lower if the cells were located further north, so long as they were in a sunny area.

As far as I know Benban is not in Asswan. It is on the extreme West Bank of the Nile directly across from Kom Ombo. I often stayed here when some rather wealthy Eurpeans once lived there. From what I understand, a number of rather large international companies are investing there, though to ensure things don't go 'tits-up' as one might say they are borrowing most of the cash from the rather crazy E.B.R.D.

The site in question must be in an area along the Asswan Agricultural Road, can not understand why there, bit like pulling down Canary Wharf to use the land to grow tomatoes. .

Brian Yare wrote:Why Aswan rather than some part of the country that needs more electricity? Transmission costs and losses would be much lower if the cells were located further north, so long as they were in a sunny area.

Benban is 25Km north of Aswan. The governorate population is 1.5 million

The longer term plan is to have a number of plants along the Nile valley development area

I guess Aswan was chosen as a starting point because it's an area suffering from high levels of unemployment and reasonable levels of local electricity consumption. Some priority is to be given to the locals, job-wise.

Although 2-4% of power is lost over transmission lines, this will be offset to a degree by the higher hours of sunshine in the Aswan area.

But Aswan generates 2.1GW of Electricity from the Dam. Much more than it uses.

My estimate of power loss in transmission is rather higher than yours, and the loss goes up as the temperature rises.

But it is possibly easier to police the generating site in the Aswan area than if it were in Middle or Lower Egypt.

Benban has a direct connection to the Western Desert Road, and on Google Earth I see a rectangular grid of earthworks to the north of that access road that might be preparation for this project.

Transmission power loss is, of course, much higher than 2-4%, probably around 15%, but most of this relates to the transformers rather than the lines and this element would be the same wherever the plants were situated.

Well, while you two do your usual internety checking, which I am sure will always bring up the truth, I placed a telephone call to get the full S.P.

Apparently, this little exercise was to be part of the, so called Toshka Project, though from what I can see, some one appears to have mistaken the Gazerra at Kom Ombo, geographically for that project,............an easy mistake I suppose for those who do not know Upper Egypt. .

The $500 million project by Norway's Scatec is in the Benban area, on the west bank opposite Kom Ombo and has nothing to do with the defunct Toshka project many kilometres to the south.......an easy mistake I suppose for someone going senile who spends too much time at the bottle.

Sounds a really good idea and I thought I would have a second look to see if the press release from the International Co-operation Ministry had more detail. Was expecting a positive result because the Minister is a bit of a poster girl for the regime and was recently promoted in Feb and given responsibility for the IMF and World Bank deals. Her cv reads as if she walks on water.

Alas this deal is not as it appears or at least the Norwegians (Scatec) explain it differently.

Pretty much every statement of fact in the Egyptian article is wrong. Even by Egyptian standards this is something of an achievement. How many things can you get wrong in three paragraphs – quite a lot.

The investment is not $US500 million as stated in the Egyptian article. Scatec says it is a $US450 million project.

There are not 40 plants as stated in the Egyptian article. Scatec state there will be 6.

The Egyptian article says that Scartec will invest the so-called $US500 – it will invest only a maximum $US70 million with other equity partners yet to finalized.

The Egyptian article says the completed plant will produce 1,800 MW. The Norwegians state it will be a plant with a capacity of 400 MW producing a yearly total of 870 GHh.

What was signed was not an investment agreement but a “25-year Power Purchase Agreements for delivery of electricity” because what was really going on was the government agreeing to pay a fixed amount for the electricity to be generated from the private plant over its life. Lets hope they negotiated well because it looks pretty generous with the company guaranteed “about $USD60 million a year” (presumably a gross revenue) on a total plant cost of $US450 million with what looks like concessional finance from a European government bank to the private electricity company. The key figure, not mentioned, is how much more expensive this electricity is than hydro, gas and the other traditional sources for Egypt.

Other news outlets made similar ‘mistakes’. http://www.zawya.com/mena/en/story/Norw ... 419032401/ and http://www.egyptindependent.com//news/n ... pt-october. with al Ahram saying that the same company had already announced another three projects for Benban. The Daily News Egypt said 11 months ago it was a done deal worth $US650 but that article is incoherent. http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2016/05/0 ... jects-ceo/. I assume it’s the International Cooperation Ministry (not the body responsible for electricity and probably little to do with this deal) hyping it or maybe they don’t actually understand what is going on or just don’t care. I hope their Minister is a bit more careful with her arithmetic with the IMF loans.

Getting to a deal has been difficult with “many’ other western companies unwilling to get involved for reasons including the jurisdiction of the Egyptian legal system and rights to repatriate profits . It seems no one trusts the Egyptian courts with their money. https://www.pv-tech.org/news/scatec-hop ... lar-scheme

I also hope the government of Egypt did its due diligence for once and signed up with a company that knows what it is doing – not like the architects for the Grand Egyptian Museum who didn’t even have a single staff member when they won the contract. I think that they also had no rented offices at the time but ran their practice out of their front sitting rooms. Lets hope its also not like the architects for the New Administrative Capital who have never done anything like that before.

Their partner for one of the world’s largest solar plants is not a proven market leader. At first sight this looks like the Scatec has taken on maybe more than it can swallow. For the company this single contract is a 66% increase over the total of all the completed jobs they have ever done to date in construction and operation and is 120% larger than their current total electricity generation operations at a substantial number of plants. Clearly this is the single biggest job they have ever done and by a large margin. Their only only other project in the region is in Jordan which is1/40th the size.

This single contract is more than the companies total current market capitalization and the company isn’t currently a good earner, has halved its profit in the last year and made $US6 million although it operates in a generally regulated industry which is usually a license to make modest but safe profits. https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/SSO:NO Its also a very big stepup in its construction activity with this single project being 8 times last years total construction activity for the whole group. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2017/03/30/ ... l-results/

To put it mildly this company is not an obvious choice for Egypt's first attempt at large solar and has no track record at this scale and limited financial firepower.

Horus: not only is transmission negatively affected by heat, so are the panels. In high heat the photovoltaic panels suffer large decline in performance. (I assume its photovoltaic –maybe they are going really high tech with an array/steam). There is a sweet spot and I don’t think its 35C+ days.

All reports say that the transmission system is f****d in Egypt, with large losses of voltage, although the army engineers are fixing it all over the next few weeks, so pumping electricity from Upper Egypt to anything more than a stones throw away is a bit of a waste until next month.

Thanks for that analysis Hafiz. Your superior investigative abilities sort the wheat from the chaff as efficiently as ever.