Martifer Solar and Egypt’s National Renewable Energy Authority (NREA) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for availing a 60.26ha land plot in Minya to build a 25MW solar plant, PV Magazine reported.

The RA SOLAR consortium, comprised of EEC Group and Martifer Solar, was qualified by the Egyptian authorities under the Feed-in-Tariff program. Martifer Solar and EEC Group have been granted land in Minya, which is approximately 245 km south of Cairo and expected to host around 450MW of solar PV plants, according to PV Tech. Construction on the project is expected to start in the Q4 2016, Martifer said. The plant will utilize single-axis trackers and sell power to the grid via a contract with the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company.

The Egyptian government has adopted a feed-in tariff (FiT) program for both solar and wind energy to target 4.3 GW of new renewable capacity to be implemented by 2017. This program is expected to help the government to reach its ambitious target of generating 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, Construction Review Online added. The 2 GW of utility-scale solar under this FiT program will be constructed among three different land plots made available by the government for the developers.