Morocco’s Office National de l’Electricite et de l’Eau Potable (ONEE) is negotiating with three development banks to finance its 850MW wind project.

The final size of ONEE’s finance deal will be around €460m.

Italy’s Enel Green Power was selected as preferred bidder for the €1bn ($1.1bn) second phase of Morocco’s wind scheme. It will have to cover around 40 per cent of the funding for the project. It is expected to secure project finance from export credit agencies, commerical and local banks.

Its consortium partners are Nareva Holding, owned by the Moroccan royal family, and Germany’s Siemens.

The project will be split over five sites:

• Tangier II (Tangier; 100MW)
• Tiskrad (Laayoune; 300MW)
• Boujdour (Boujdour; 100MW)
• Midelt (Midelt; 150MW)
• Jbel Lahdid (Essaouira; 200MW)

The lenders on the Midelt, Tangier II and Jbel Lahdid projects are the European Investment Bank (€200m) and Germany’s KfW (€200m). As with the Noor solar projects, the banks will lend to ONEE rather than the developer, with a sovereign guarantee.

The African Development Bank (AfDB), through it the Clean Technology Fund, will lend €35m and $31m respectively for the Tangier II site.

The state-owned Energy Investment Company (SIE) and the Hassan II Fund for Economic & Social Development offered to take a stake in each of the five project companies.

Enel did not respond to a request for comment.

The bid prices were reported to be between $0.025 and $0.03 a kilowatt hour, a historic low price.