SHARM EL-SHEIKH: According to an official announcement on the Gulf nation’s national news agency, the presidents of the UAE and Egypt witnessed the signing of an agreement on Tuesday to create one of the world’s largest onshore wind farms in Egypt.
According to a statement by news agency WAM, the Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the UAE’s renewable energy firm Masdar and its joint venture with Egypt’s largest renewable energy developer Infinity and Hassan Allam Utilities.
Masdar, which has a portfolio of renewable energy assets worth more than $20 billion and a total capacity of more than 15 GW, stated that the new project would be its largest ever.
“Masdar is happy to bolster our commitment to Egypt’s renewable energy ambitions with this agreement to create our largest ever project,” Masdar CEO Mohamed Jameel Al-Ramahi stated.
The deal was reached on the fringes of the COP27 climate summit in Egypt’s coastal resort of Sharm El-Sheikh on Tuesday.
The United Arab Emirates will host the COP28 meeting next year.
When finished, the wind farm will be part of Egypt’s Green Corridor plan, a system dedicated to renewable energy projects that aims to make renewable energy account for 42 percent of the country’s energy mix by 2035.
According to the announcement, the wind farm will save Egypt $5 billion in annual natural gas expenditures. Egypt’s overall installed power capacity was roughly 59.5 GW in 2019/2020, according to an annual report from the country’s renewable energy administration.
“The initiative would enable the country to preserve large volumes of natural gas, thereby achieving economic growth, reducing carbon emissions, and providing more access to sustainable energy sources,” said Mohamed Mansour, chairman of Infinity Power, a joint venture between Masdar and Infinity.
Masdar and Hassan Allam Utilities signed two Memorandums of Understanding in April with Egyptian state-backed companies to collaborate on the building of four gigatonnes of green hydrogen production plants in the Suez Canal Economic Zone and along the Mediterranean coast.
According to the statement, the first phase of the project will see the development and operation of a green hydrogen manufacturing facility capable of producing 100,000 tons of e-methanol yearly for Suez Canal bunkering by 2026.
According to the company, the electrolyzer facilities could be expanded to 4 GW by 2030, producing 2.3 million tons of green ammonia for export and supplying green hydrogen to local industry.
Source: Arab News
