Egypt: Power procurement is evolving to meet new government priorities

New African Energy research shows Egypt’s power sector is evolving with extraordinary rapidity.

The trajectory of the sector, which has witnessed a massive transition to gas-to-power (GTP) generation since 2015, has now shifted forcibly towards renewables.

Procurement is evolving

With government priorities shifting, procurement, which started with large scale state-owned EPC+Finance initiatives, has progressed rapidly through the feed-in tariff and BOOT tender processes to the increasing predominance of bilaterally negotiated IPPs.

African Energy's Egypt Power Report 2021 looks at the government’s power sector priorities as it plans for the next phase of procurement and examines the sector opportunities that are opening up, including:

• An imminent opening of a secondary market for solar FiT project.
• Progress towards the potential sale of three 4.8GW gas-to-power (GTP) plants and the alternative priorities that the authorities could use for evaluating bids in a process which is still opaque.
• Early net-metering projects, which represent the first phase of market-based projects.
• The prospects for Egypt as a regional energy hub as the government aims to open markets in the Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa and in Europe.
• The potential impact of desalination on the currently very large reserve capacity margin as Egypt faces up to concerns about growing water shortages and Ethiopia’s development of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.

Read more and download the report's detailed list of contents

The report examines progress towards subsidy reform and full sector liberalisation and analyses tariffs and market structure to provide an estimate of the proportion of power customers now paying close to cost-reflective tariffs.

The report also considers potential supply and demand scenarios and asks how much of the existing less-efficient thermal generation may have to be decommissioned.

Analysis is underpinned and informed by independent power generation forecasts based on the actual project development pipeline, with data drawn from African Energy Live Data – our proprietary database of more than 6,500 power projects and plants.

Join our Free webinar on 20 May (12pm BST)

Join African Energy for a free webinar – Egypt new risks and new opportunities, where the report's authors will discuss some of the risks, realities, opportunities and threats associated with entering Egypt's electricity industry.

In the short video below John Hamilton introduces some of the main talking points.