Morocco is putting around 18 billion dollars behind storage, flexible gas and transmission by 2030.
At an end of April gathering in Marrakech, the National Office of Electricity and Drinking Water (ONEE) laid out a plan to keep its rapidly rising renewable share, currently around 47 percent of the electricity mix, on the grid without destabilising it. The headline number is more than 3,500 MW of storage capacity by 2030. Alongside it come 4,500 MW of flexible gas-fired capacity that can start quickly when renewable output drops, and 6,000 km of new very high voltage lines to carry power from remote production sites to the main consumption centres. The whole package belongs to an investment programme of more than MAD 180 billion, around 18 billion dollars, by 2030.
What to look for
The plan sets targets but no tender calendar, so ONEE’s procurement schedule is the tell. I will be watching for the first storage tender: its size, its sites and its bidder list. The 4,500 MW of gas is the other half of the story. Morocco is firming its renewables with fuel as well as batteries, and my read is that the split between the two will decide how much of the flexibility bill wind developers end up carrying.
What it means for MENA
We read this as a strong signal that the next wave of MENA wind investment will be priced as wind plus storage. The cheapest wind hours only matter if the grid can hold them until the load needs them, and Morocco is now budgeting for that at national scale.
If you are mapping MENA wind opportunities for the next twenty four months, draw the storage layer first and the wind layer on top. Where do you see the firming bottleneck biting hardest, Algeria, Tunisia, or further east?
