Egypt

Saudi power company ACWA Power today revealed it has signed a 25-year power purchase agreement with the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company and said development was on track for generation to start before October next year.

A British-Egyptian research group has tested the use of hydrogels beads for PV module cooling. The micro-sized particles were saturated with aluminium oxide (Al2O3) water-based nanofluids and placed below the simulated PV panels. The experiment showed, according to the scientists, that the hydrogels beads were able to significantly reduce the temperature by between 17.9 and 16.3 degrees Celsius.

The $156.4 million Kom Ombo photovoltaic solar power plant is being developed by Saudi energy giant ACWA Power.

An overview of the state of solar across the continent by trade body the Africa Solar Industry Association has highlighted a patchy policy landscape where clean power ambitions are often not followed through.

India’s Sterling and Wilson – which has a global solar engineering, procurement and construction portfolio of more than 10.6 GWp – says that its latest contract in Egypt is for one of the country’s largest PV projects.

A new, nature-inspired algorithm has been applied by scientists in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to optimize the production of green hydrogen via solar and wind power generation. The proposed energy system consists of PV and wind power generation, a water electrolyzer, a tank of hydrogen gas, a fuel cell, and an inverter that brings the generated electricity to final consumers.

An international research team has used, for the first time, a powerful metaheuristic and a nature-inspired algorithm to improve the estimation of the parameters of PV cells and modules. The algorithm imitates the natural phenomenon of growth and uses the diffusion process, based on random fractals.

The private-sector arm of the World Bank, which claims to leverage $3 of its own capital and $8 from third parties for every dollar invested in its blended finance funds, has attempted to quantify what devoting Covid recovery funds to green investment would mean for emerging economies.

UAE-based AlNowais Investments Company has been allowed to increase the size of its solar project in Kom Ombo from 200 to 500 MW. The facility will sell power to the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company (EETC) under a long-term, bilateral PPA.

Solarizegypt will receive payments from Coca Cola for a 1 MW array it has installed on an industrial facility in Sadat City under the nation’s net metering regime.