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Energywise Energy Renewables

17 Sep 2019 | 14:00 GMT

Egypt’s Massive 1.8 Gigawatt

Benban Solar Park Nears
Completion
Sun-soaked Egypt’s first utility-scale PV power plant
—one of the world’s largest solar installations—is
coming online

By Amy Nordrum

Photo: Dominic Chavez/IFC

Philippe Le Houérou, CEO of the International Finance Corporation, visits Benban

Solar Park in Egypt.

Amid the sand dunes of the eastern Sahara, workers are putting the finishing
touches on one of the world’s largest solar installations. There, as many as 7.2
million photovoltaic panels will make up Benban Solar Park—a renewable
energy project so massive, it will be visible from space. Editor's Picks

The 1.8-gigawatt installation is the first utility-scale PV plant in Egypt, a Saudi Arabia Pushes to Use
nation blessed with some of the best solar resources on the planet. The Solar Power for Desalination
Plants
ambitious project is part of Egypt’s efforts to increase its generation capacity
and incorporate more renewable sources into the mix.
ABB & Siemens Test Subsea
“I think Benban Solar Park is the first real step to put Egypt on the solar Power Grids for Underwater
Factories
production world map,” says Mohamed Orabi, a professor of power
electronics at Aswan University.
Hawaii Votes to Go 100%
Renewable
Climate change is an increasingly urgent issue for Egyptians and much of the
world. Already, global sea and air surface temperatures have risen by an
average of 1 degree C above pre-industrial levels, according to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In Egypt, global warming will
reduce agricultural productivity, induce flooding in the fertile Nile Delta, and
cause more people to die from heat stress.

Next week, world leaders will gather in New York for the United Nations
Climate Action Summit, where they’re expected to present “concrete, realistic
plans” to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Low-
carbon energy systems played a key role in a mitigation plan [PDF] that Egypt
submitted in advance of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Once operational, Benban
Solar Park will avoid two million tons of CO2 emissions per year [PDF]
compared with what’s belched into the air by a thermal power
station generating the same amount of electricity. That difference is roughly
equivalent to half the annual emissions produced by one coal-fired power
plant.

To create the park, Egypt’s government selected a remote desert site with high
solar radiation and divided it into 41 plots of varying sizes. It assigned those
plots to roughly 30 developers that expressed interest in the project, and the
government promised to pay a competitive price (through financial incentives
called feed-in tariffs [PDF]) for all power produced at Benban for 25 years.

Photo: Mohamed El-sheikh

Egypt’s Benban Solar Park has an expected lifespan of 25 years.

With loans from the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank,
the state-owned Egyptian Electricity Holding Company built roads and other
infrastructure at the site, including four substations, a control center, and a
connection to an adjacent corridor of 220-kilovolt (kV) transmission lines. (In
the future, the utility may also connect the park to two 500-kV high-voltage
transmission lines that pass nearby.)

The developers, which include Alcazar Energy, IB Vogt, Scatec Solar, and
Shapoorji Pallonji, installed panels, transformers, and inverters on their
respective plots. The plots are arranged in four rows, each with a substation at
the end. Electricity travels from the panels on each plot to the substations
through 22-kV cables buried in the sand.

Photo: Dominic Chavez/IFC

Workers carry medium-voltage cables at Benban Solar Park in Egypt.

Mohamed Elsheikh, a contractor who has worked at Benban, says the desert
site now looks like “a big ocean” of photovoltaics. Orabi, who has consulted
on several projects at the park, estimates that more than 80 percent of
installations there are now complete.

For the most part, Orabi says, construction at Benban has been smooth,
despite delays in installing the substations and some issues with the site’s
automated control system that have forced it to be manually operated for
now.

Ibrahim Helal, an electrical consultant in Cairo, warns that the area’s high
temperatures—which frequently top 38 degrees C (100 degrees F) in the
summer—could affect the site’s many inverters, which convert the DC power
produced by the panels to the AC power required for the grid. “These
electrical devices are really sensitive to temperature,” he says.

Elsheikh, head of the electrical department at Emeco, says Schneider Electric

did have to repair one inverter at the site after its cable connection
overheated. But overall, he says, his team installed more than 200,000 panels
without a hitch. “The failures have been a very, very small percentage,” he
says.

High temperatures can also reduce the efficiency of PV cells, as can sand or
dust that blows onto the panels. To combat the latter, employees will clean all
the panels at Benban once or twice a month by passing by in specialized
tractors equipped with brushes.

Egypt began laying the groundwork

for the US $4 billion Benban project
after enduring repeated blackouts,
caused by severe fuel shortages, that
reached their worst point in August
2014. At the time, peak demand was
28 GW but the country’s production
was limited to just 24 GW.

Around that time, Egypt’s

Illustration: Global Solar Atlas
government signed a deal with
This map shows high photovoltaic power
Siemens to construct three new gas- potential in Egypt, where the sun shines
fired combined-cycle power plants, for 9 to 11 hours a day all year.
each with a capacity of 4.8 GW.
Those power plants are now also
coming online.

Helal believes all of these investments have positioned Egypt well for its
future. “Egypt now is growing very fast,” he says. “Even though it may look at
the moment like we have a huge reserve of energy, I believe in the
forthcoming few years, this will be consumed.”

Orabi thinks the next step for Benban should be to invest in energy storage to
ensure the power produced there is put to good use, and to help smooth out
any grid fluctuations.

Visible from Space: The World’s Largest Solar Power Plant

Egypt’s government has set a goal for 20 percent of the nation’s electricity to
come from renewable sources by 2022, and 42 percent by 2035. The country’s
potential may be even greater: A 2018 report by the International Renewable
Energy Agency concluded that Egypt could “realistically draw 53 percent of its
electricity from renewables by 2030.” In 2016, about 9 percent of Egypt’s
electricity [PDF] came from renewable sources, and mostly from dams along
the Nile River.

Orabi says the Benban project has already played three important roles in
helping solar to claim a greater share of Egypt’s electricity supply. First, the
project drove down the cost of PV systems in Egypt. Second, it proved that
solar could be a viable source of energy there, after several high-profile flops
of concentrated solar projects. And lastly, Orabi says, it granted valuable
experience in installing PV systems to more than 3,000 Egyptians who
worked at the site.

Benban was the first utility-scale solar PV project that Elsheikh had ever
managed in his career, which had always centered on rooftop installations.
After his firm completed a Benban project for the company IB Vogt, Elsheikh
soon heard from other developers that needed help with their own projects
there. He says Benban has already started to inspire investors to consider
building more utility-scale solar PV projects in Egypt.

“We have now a lot of interest,” he says. “I’m so proud that I worked on this.”

Editor’s note: This story is published in cooperation with more than 250
media organizations and independent journalists that have focused their
coverage on climate change ahead of the UN Climate Action Summit. IEEE
Spectrum’s participation in the Covering Climate Now partnership builds
on our past reporting about this global issue.

This story was updated on 18 September 2019.

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Ahmed Elguindy • 9 days ago

The final official commercial capacity is 1.465 GWp and the figure of 1.8 GWp is outdated.
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saw123 • 16 days ago

I read over the article a couple of times looking for cost. As an engineer, you can only evaluate the effectiveness of a system by using comparable costs and other trade-off
characteristics. How can we know how viable a system is until we can determine its un-subsidized cost?
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markjohn • 17 days ago

considering egypt is on the eastern end of the saharan desert ... i'm trying to figure out how this project is located in the western sahara ... egypt is on the eastern coast of africa and
there is a country/region on the west coast of africa named .... wait for it ... western sahara ...
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Amy Nordrum IEEE Spectrum > markjohn • 16 days ago

Hi there, and thanks for catching that. I was thinking of Egypt's "Western Desert." I've corrected the lede and appreciate the note.
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