Another mega wind farm in Egypt: Egyptian contracting firm Orascom Construction’s (OC) consortium with France’s Engie and Japan’s Toyota Tsusho has signed up to build a 3 GW wind farm, just days after breaking ground on their 500 MW wind project in Ras Ghareb, according to an OC statement (pdf). The consortium signed an MoU for the wind farm with Egyptian energy authorities on the sidelines of COP, with the country’s Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouly attending the signing ceremony. There are no details on the location or timeline for the project.

The details: OC is responsible for construction and will take an unspecified equity stake in the wind farm, which will be set up under a build, own, operate (BOO) framework. This will be the OC consortium’s third local wind farm. Its Ras Ghareb project should go live in 2025, and it completed a 262.5 MW wind farm, also in Ras Ghareb, in 2019.

Wind is one of the front runners at COP: The project brings the total new wind-power generation capacity Egypt has locked down in recent days to 28 GW. That’s nearly half of the country’s current installed capacity, which at the end of 2021 stood at 59.5 GW. It is also more than 8x greater than the country’s total renewable-energy generation capacity, which was 3.4 GW at the end of last year. The new projects include two separate 10 GW wind farms that are set to be two of the world’s largest: One from our friends at Infinity Power and Hassan Allam Utilities together with long-time partner Masdar; and the other from Saudi renewable energy developer Acwa Power.