Philadelphia Solar, a developer of large scale PV power plants and the first manufacturer of PV modules and steel structure in the Middle East, has signed in Sharm El-Sheikh a Memorandum of Understanding with the Egypt New and Renewable Energy Authority (NREA) for availing land to build a 50MWac power plant as part of the first wave of projects offered by the Egyptian Government under the Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) scheme. The MOU specifies the exact coordinates of the piece of land (about 1 million square meters) to be used for the project.
His Excellency Dr. Mohamed Shaker El-Markabi, Egypt Minister of Electricity and Energy, witnessed the signing which took place between Dr. Mohamed Sobki, Chairman of NREA, and Mr. Basim Saleh, CEO of Philadelphia.Dr. Sobki said: “this will be one of several projects totaling 2,000MW that will be built as part of the first round under the FiT scheme.”
The project, which was signed during the third day of the Egypt Economic Development Conference, will include the engineering and construction of a single-axis tracking PV system in the south of Egypt (Binban). Philadelphia will sign a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with the Egypt transmission company to sell the generated electricity for US$0.143/kWh for a period of 25 years. The Government announced that the PPA draft will be ready for review by the developers in April.
“We are very proud to be the first Jordanian company to win such a sizeable project in Egypt, and are proud to be part of the positive growth Egypt is enjoying, which was evident at the conference in Sharm El-Sheikh,” said Basim Saleh. “Our aim is to work with the Egyptian public and private sector partners, and with regional and international financing institutions, to help our Egyptian brothers build much needed electricity capacity through PV generation.”