The financial close of two significant large-scale projects in Egypt could mark progress for the country’s nascent energy storage sector.
Developers Scatec and AMEA Power have both achieved the development milestone for their projects in the past few days.
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Norway’s Scatec closed on a gigawatt-scale solar PV plant integrated with a battery energy storage system (BESS) and UAE-headquartered AMEA Power did likewise for the BESS retrofit of an existing solar PV plant.
300MWh BESS addition to AMEA Power’s Abydos PV plant
AMEA Power announced via LinkedIn on Sunday (15 June) that it has secured US$72 million from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). The financing will fund the integration of a 300MWh BESS into the developer’s 500MW Abydos Solar Project in Aswan Governate, about 960km south of Cairo, the capital city of Egypt.
IFC director for North Africa and the Horn of Africa Cheick-Oumar Syllar and AMEA Power Egypt Samir Nacef signed the financing documents at a ceremony attended by dignitaries, including Egypt’s prime minister Mostafa Madbouly, and minister for electricity and renewable energy, Dr. Mahmoud Esmat.
AMEA Power commissioned the Abydos solar PV plant in December last year, as reported by our colleagues at PV Tech, with Madbouly and Esmat also in attendance for a ceremony to mark that occasion, too. The solar portion of Abydos was financed by IFC, along with fellow development finance institutions Dutch Entrepreneurial Development Bank (FMO) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).
JA Solar supplied the solar PV modules from the Chinese manufacturer’s DeepBlue 3.0 range, featuring a proprietary ‘Gapless Flexible Interconnection technology.
Around the same time as the solar portion was inaugurated, AMEA Power announced that the project’s BESS technology would be supplied by another Chinese vertically integrated solar PV manufacturer, Trinasolar, using Trinasolar’s Elementa 2 lithium iron phosphate (LFP) containerised BESS solution. Energy China ZTPC, a subsidiary of state-owned Energy China Construction Group is partnering with Trinasolar on the installation.
200MWh BESS at Scatec’s 1.2GW Obelisk solar-plus-storage
Also yesterday, Scatec and development finance institutions European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), African Development Bank (AfDB), and British International Investment (BII) announced non-recourse financing for the Obelisk solar-plus-storage project.
The trio’s US$479.1 million project financing covers 80% of the project’s total expected US$590 million Capex investment, Scatec said. The announcement follows the Norwegian company previously raising US$120 million in equity bridge loans for the project, while project equity injections have been postponed to the end of the construction period.
Scatec will also carry out engineering, procurement and construction (EPC), asset management and operations and maintenance (O&M).
Obelisk will be constructed in two phases: the first will see the deployment of 561MW solar PV with 100MW/200MWh of battery storage, the second will comprise 564MW of additional solar generation capacity.
It will be built in the Nagaa Hammadi region on the western bank of the Nile River, about 360km north of Aswan Governate. EBRD is providing a US$173 million loan, AfDB US$184.1 million and BII US$115 million. Phase One is scheduled to go into operation in the first half of 2026 and Phase Two in the second.
PPAs with national grid and power generation company EETC
In both instances, 25-year power purchase agreements (PPAs) were signed by the projects’ developers with the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company in September last year. EETC was established as a subsidiary of the national utility Egyptian Electricity Holding Company in 1976 and is responsible for power plants and transmission & distribution (T&D).
AMEA Power has further large-scale storage project PPAs signed with the national electricity company: one for a 1GW solar PV plant with 600MWh of BESS, also in Aswan Governate and signed at the same time as the Abydos BESS PPA, and two contracts for standalone BESS projects totalling 1,500MWh, signed in February this year.
The projects will be Egypt’s first examples of large-scale battery storage, supporting diversification of the energy mix and the adoption of renewable energy resources. As noted by EBRD in its announcement, Egypt is targeting for 42% of its power mix to come from renewables by 2030.
According to decarbonisation consultancy and think tank Ember, as of April 2025, the country’s share of clean electricity is about 11%, with hydroelectric power the biggest contributor (6%). Solar and wind account for about 4.8% of the electricity mix, which Ember noted is about three times lower than the global average of 15%.
