Egypt’s Kom Ombo solar reaches belated milestones

Landmark PV project signals Cairo’s growing renewables ambitions

The development of Egypt’s clean energy industry has long moved in fits and starts—buffeted by politics, economics and, latterly, the disruptions arising from a global pandemic. However, the implementation of plans to build a major solar plant at Kom Ombo, near Aswan in Upper Egypt, has been particularly protracted—born as a 100MW concentrated solar power project at the turn of last decade, morphing into ten 20MW photovoltaic (PV) plants, and emerging in its current form in 2016, when the government’s New and Renewable Energy Authority (NREA) invited developers to pitch for a single 200MW PV independent power project (IPP). 20pc – Egypt’s targeted share of renewables in generation mix