Tunisia’s Ministry of Mines and Energy has extended the deadline for project proposals for a 70 MW solar tender by two months, from Wednesday August 15 to October 18.
Proposals need to be submitted to the energy ministry before noon on the day in question.
The tender was initially announced on May 30 and concerns six projects of 10 MW capacity and another 10 of 1 MW.
Tunisia’s tender model
It is the second round of calls for PV projects of this kind, termed a Regime Authorizations tender. The winners of the first such exercise were revealed in May and also concerned 70 MW of capacity.
An additional “Regime Concessions” tender of 500 MW is at the pre-qualification phase and regards PV projects on five sites, each with a capacity of between 50 and 200 MW.
Successful proposals in both tenders translate into projects that need to be developed under the build, own, operate model by which the owners of PV farms sell the electricity generated to Tunisia’s state-owned Société Tunisienne de l’Electricité et du Gaz (STEG) utility, under 20-year power purchase agreements.
Competitive PPAs
Popular content
Given Tunisia does not have a feed-in tariff, its tender model rewards bids offering the lowest priced electricity, with investors submitting PPA prices to the utility.
Tunisia meets around 97% of its electricity needs from gas and oil.
German development agency Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) says in 2015 energy subsidies in the north African state reached around €150 billion ($173 billion), stretching the state budget.
Renewable energy targets
Furthermore, according to GIZ, Tunisia installed only 35 MW of solar PV capacity last year.
The Tunisian Solar Plan is aiming for 30% of the country’s electricity generation in 2030 – 3.8 GW – to be from renewables and the authorities have set a goal of 1 GW of installed PV and wind power capacity by 2020, with an additional 1.25 GW of renewable capacity by 2025.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.