A wind turbine went up beside an oil refinery in Duqm this month, and its electricity will feed the factory meant to build the next ones.
O-Green says it has installed a 9.6 MW turbine near the OQ8 refinery in Oman, on a 115-metre tower with blades close to 100 metres long. Arab News reports it as the largest onshore unit of its kind outside China. The power goes to industries at Duqm, including the neighbouring Mawarid Turbine manufacturing facility. That plant traces to usufruct agreements signed in January between OPAZ, Oman’s special economic zones authority, and Mawarid Turbine, covering three plots at Duqm: one for the factory, one for a single turbine, one for five more. Arab News puts planned annual output at 800 to 1,000 MW, with a first phase costing about 70 million Omani rials, roughly 182 million dollars. O-Green says Omani contractors and specialists worked the job “from engineering and site works through construction and the complex transportation and installation of the tower sections and blades.”
Why it matters
A factory’s power normally arrives from the grid at whatever mix the system is running that hour. This one is being wired to its own product. My read is that captive renewable supply turns an industrial site’s power bill from a tariff into an owned asset, and here it happens on an estate that already runs a refinery.
What it means for MENA
Duqm now has something physical on the plot: a 9.6 MW machine standing near the factory site and feeding it. The test from here is whether the rest of the six turbines in that January allocation go up on schedule, and whether the first blades out of the shed are Omani.
