A consortium containing Spain’s Acciona Group and Saudi Arabia’s Swicorp has started construction work on three photovoltaic (PV) plants in Egypt under the second round of the North African state’s Feed-in-tariff (FIT) programme.

MEED reported in October that the international consortium had been awarded a contract to develop three PV plants with a total capacity of 150MW. The solar plants will be developed in the Benban complex in the Aswan region of Egypt. The total value of the solar plants will be about $180m.

Swicorp and Acciona will each hold a 50 per cent stake in the project company. Acciona is also part of the EPC consortium that will build the

Each plant is expected to take 12 months to build, and will be equipped with 190,774 polycrystalline silicon modules supplied by China’s Jinko Solar technology.

The developer consortium has signed a 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company (EETC) under the terms of the second round of Egypt’s FIT programme. The group will receive financing from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).