Netherlands-based Lekela Power has awarded Spain’s Siemens Gamesa a contract to deliver and install 96 wind turbines at the 250MW West Bakr wind farm, which will be developed 30km northwest of Ras Gharib on Egypt’s Gulf of Suez. Siemens Gamesa says the first turbines will be delivered in mid-2020 with the project scheduled to be fully operational in 2021. The wind farm is expected to deliver over 1TWh per year of electricity, which would be equivalent to operating a 115MW conventional plant all year.
Lekela reached financial close for the project in August. London-based EBRD, the World Bank’s IFC unit and the US government’s Opic announced on 8 August that they had agreed to jointly provide $252mn to finance the project. Lekela expects the project to cost $325mn in total. It is one of a number of Egyptian wind projects slowed by a Ministry of Electricity decision to offer tariffs that developers found unattractive. Only when NREA was able to revert to BOO terms did wind project development begin again (MEES, 11 May 2018). Abu Dhabi-based renewables agency Irena estimates Egypt’s end-2018 wind power capacity at 1.125GW. (CONTINUED - 187 WORDS)