Egypt received bids from 55 companies to build and operate the country’s first wind farm as part of a plan to generate a fifth of the country’s electricity from wind power.
“We are still at an early stage,” Aktham Abulelah, spokesman for the Electricity and Energy Ministry, said in a telephone interview today. “Companies are still welcome to make their offers” until July 21 and the winner will be picked in about three months.
The companies are bidding to develop a 250-megawatt onshore wind farm on the coast of the Gulf of Suez, he said. The project will be awarded on a build-own-operate basis. He refused to identify any bidders, saying only that they were “international” companies.
Consultants from Canada are advising the energy regulator on the technical, legal and planning aspects of the project, and the work is funded by the World Bank.
Egypt aims to create 7,200 megawatts of electricity capacity from wind power by 2020, or 20 percent of the country’s total, Abulelah said. The government has already set aside 300,000 feddans (311,400 acres) of land for the projects in the Zafarana area south of the city of Suez.
The projects in Zafarana are expected to generate 6,000 megawatts of the planned wind capacity, Abulelah said.
