EDF to set up wind turbines in Morocco

On Monday, EDF Energies Nouvelles and Mitsui of Japan announced a 150 megawatt project in northern Morocco. The country has a target of two gigawatts of wind power and two gigawatts of solar power by 2020.

In the past decade, the focus of renewable generators in Morocco was on small distributed systems, such as this one on a rural home (photo from January 2009). But increasingly, the country is installing utility-scale renewable power plants.

Source: Craig Morris

On Monday, EDF Energies Nouvelles, the renewables subsidiary of French power giant EDF, announced the founding of a local office for renewable projects in Morocco: EDF EN Maroc, which is based in Casablanca. According to a report in Le Figaro, the company is starting with a wind farm in Taza just east of Fez, where fifty 3 MW Alstom turbines will be installed. Next year, 850 megawatts is in the offing in a second round of bidding.

Japan's Mitsui has reportedly been contracted to help handle the design, financing, development, and production of the Taza wind farm and will also be taking care of operation and maintenance for 20 years. France may soon implement a domestic content requirement for its solar projects at home, and EDF points out that "at least 30 percent of construction work" will be farmed out to Moroccan subcontractors, allowing the firm to "set up a long-term partnership with the kingdom of Morocco."

No mention was made of Medgrid, the French plan to create a Mediterranean power grid, in the announcements, and there is no word on whether this power is intended mainly for consumption within Morocco or for export. But the news is the second triumph this month for EDF and Alstom, who managed to get three of the four tenders worth 1.4 gigawatts in the first round of bidding for offshore wind in France along with Dong Energy of Denmark.

Unlike neighboring Algeria and Libya, Morocco has practically no oil resources and is therefore likely to be one of the first northern African countries to go renewable. As Reuters points out, the country is not only quickly expanding wind power, but also solar; its nine billion USD solar program is expected to increase solar to 38 percent of the country's installed power generation capacity by 2020. At the Strait of Gibraltar, Morocco is also the closest North African country to Europe, which is likely to facilitate the installation of undersea power cables – hence Europe's interest in power imports from the country not only in France's Medgrid, but also in Germany's Desertec. (Craig Morris)