Iberdrola Builds World’s First Hybrid Gas-CSP Plant in Egypt

Talk continues on the almost complete concentrated solar power (CSP) plant in Egypt where Iberdrola Ingeniería y Construcción is building the world’s first plant using gas and solar power. Currently, a similar plant is being built in Morocco and another one in Algeria, but the first one to begin operations will be the ISCC Kuraymat.

Construction began in January 2008 and operations are scheduled to begin in October 2010, with a 30-month construction period, two months for integration with the solar field and one month of reliability tests. The Kuraymat Integrated Solar Combined Cycle (ISCC) plant will operate at night as a conventional natural gas Combined Cycle (CC), to which the contribution of the solar power hours will be added during the day, operating as a hybrid combined cycle (HCC) of gas and solar power.

The plant will be able to supply electric power to some 200,000 inhabitants and, additionally, it will set a precedent in Egypt for the exploitation of the many power resources stemming from solar power, and a benchmark HCC power plant in North Africa.

The new plant, with $460 million of investments in total, is expected to produce annually 3,000 tons of polysilicon to produce solar cells, and 1,500 tons of gas to manufacture the cells. However, Egypt has a major problem: the country currently faces a natural gas growth rate estimated at about 8% annually with locally produced natural gas only coming in at 6% annually (Using Gas to Increase Solar Energy Could be Trouble). While other natural gas projects in Egypt have been put on hold, it will be interesting to see if Kuraymat will face the same fate.

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