Egypt to contract 1000 MW wind farm

Egypt’s ministry of electricity told Bikyamasr.com on Wednesday morning that they are hopeful to award a contract for a massive 1,000 megawatt wind farm in the country.

The ministry said they hope the new project, upon inking the deal, will be fully functional by 2016 to help ease Egypt’s electricity needs.

According to a ministry spokesman, who was not authorized to speak to the media, the new project hopes to be “completed by the end of the month and enable the company and the government to begin logistics on building it.”

Egypt has been pushing hard on renewable energy in recent years, seeing wind power as one of the keys to the country’s expected energy crisis.

The country hopes to be using some 20 percent of all power from alternative sources by 2020, an ambitious plan that has seen some curtailing since an uprising in January 2011 threw our the former government.

But, the country already has a 200 MW wind farm on the Red Sea coast with Spain’s Gamesa and the entire region is producing some 400 MW of total wind power.