ACWA Power Extends Africa’s Renewable Energy Capacity with PV Facility in Morocco

ACWA Power Extends Africa’s Renewable Energy Capacity with PV Facility in Morocco
  • NOOR PV 1 Programme PPA signed during COP22 in Marrakech
  • Three new PV plants of 170MW total installed capacity planned for the Kingdom of Morocco

Marrakech, Morocco: A consortium led by leading water and power developer ACWA Power completed the signing of an agreement to develop and operate a 170 MW photovoltaic (PV) facility in the Kingdom of Morocco during a ceremony at COP22 in Marrakech.

The NOOR PV I Programme will consist of three projects: NOOR Ouarzazate IV with a capacity of around 7O MW, NOOR Laayoune, 80 MW and NOOR Boujdour 20 MW. ACWA Power submitted the lowest tariff price for the project at 4,6MADc/kWh, i.e. 4.8$c/kWh.

Together, the NOOR PV I Programme and the NOOR Ouarzazate I, II and III CSP projects demonstrate the viability of all solar technologies, and advance the Moroccan Kingdom’s ambition to install two gigawatts of solar energy by 2020.

The NOOR PV I Programme will be included in the recently launched ACWA Power RenewCo, a new company created to group ACWA Power’s existing renewable energy portfolio, which already exceeds 1 GW. The company will be headed by Chris Ehlers, who is currently Chief Operating Officer – Renewables at ACWA Power and has been appointed Chief Executive Officer.

In collaboration with the Chint Group, Sterling & Wilson and Shapoorji Pallonji, ACWA Power will undertake the NOOR PV I Programme, launched by Masen (Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy), under a 20-year build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT) scheme.

Masen has entered into a power purchase agreement (PPAs) to off-take the output generated electricity and will also act as a shareholder together with ACWA Power in addition to sole lender.

As part of the finance structure for the NOOR Laayoune and NOOR Boujdour projects, Masen has issued the first sovereign-guaranteed “green bond” in Morocco for the financing of a sustainable energy project. German bank Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau will fund the NOOR Ouarzazate IV project.

Construction on NOOR PV I will begin in Q1 2017 and is estimated to take 12 months to complete.

The plants will produce enough electricity to power thousands homes every year, using photovoltaic (PV) solar panels to generate electricity. It is estimated that the project will also reduce carbon emissions by tens of thousands of tons of CO2, equivalent emissions for every year of operation.