Egypt’s Electricity & Energy Ministry is planning to oversee a programme to develop an additional 54GW of power generation capacity by 2022.

Speaking at the Egypt Economic Development Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Electricity & Energy Minister Mohamed Shaker said the ministry was targeting 54GW of new capacity over the next seven years.

“We will require an additional 6GW [a year] through to 2022,” said Shaker. “We will be developing this through a number of fuels, including gas, clean coal, renewables and nuclear.”

Shaker said peak electricity demand was increasing by 6 per cent a year.

The minister said the total programme, including transmission and distribution upgrades, would need $70.7bn of investment. He said $45.7bn of this would likely come from the private sector, with private sector finance required to fund the remaining $25bn.

Shaker said a minimum of 12.5GW of the new capacity would be developed through coal-fired plants, which followed the signing of memorandums of understanding (MoUs) for major coal plants during the conference. Several coal facilities were announced during the conference, although they may not all be commissioned by 2022. They include:

• Saudi Arabia’s Acwa Power developing a $7bn, 4,000MW plant
• Al-Tharwa developing a $10.6bn, 6,000MW plant
• China’s Shanghai Electric developing a $6.4bn, 4,640MW plant
• China’s Dongfang Electric developing a $3bn, 1,980MW plant

The minister said 20 per cent of the additional capacity was planned to come from renewable energy projects, which includes 4,300MW of capacity planned through the feed-in tariff programme.

Egypt’s electricity sector has been severely affected by outages during peak periods in the past three years, costing the economy billions of dollars.