By Mohammed Jetutu, North Africa Correspondent, in Cairo
Egypt is working on tripling its renewable energy generating capacity in just four years. “By the year 2022 we hope that the capacity will be about 20%, which means that we have to have about 9,000MW of renewables after the said year”, Mohammed Shaker, the country’s Minister of Eectricity and Renewable, discloses.
“Here is an opportunity for anyone looking to invest. We generate about 3,655MW in renewable energy plus a fair amount of about 120MW this is actually for everything (hydro and solar) which is in operation and under construction. We have permission for some allocated areas in Egypt to generate up to 90,000MW from renewables”.
Speaking to a group of businessmen in Cairo, in a meeting sponsored by the American Chamber of Commerce, Shaker says that “the thing to fix” with the procurement of renewables in Egypt is the method of feed-in tariffs. “We are going to stop it, we are resorting to what we call an auction system because with auctions we will be able to get the far better prices. The feed-in tariffs was structured approximately at about $7.1 in peculiar hours but with auctions we can go down to $3.8 or even less because the pricing of the photovoltaic panel is going down very sharply and because of that we not going through auction with large quantity versus small ones one after one to match the reduction happening in the cost of the PV panel”.
Shaker says that his ministry has devised a system called net metering. “If you generate electricity from solar panels on the roof and you are injecting it in the network we will be measuring both from your photo voltaic and the ones supplied from the network and subtracting this from each other. So once your consumption is more than one thousand kilowatt hour per month you’ll be making money out of this because the price is now for over one thousand megawatt is currently 155piastres (1.55 Egyptian Pounds) but it is going to be increasing for the next three years and I will actually publish this but not now”.
Full text of the speech is available here
