One contractor has now built or is building more than 1.8 gigawatts of Egyptian wind.
PowerChina said this month that its Egyptian wind portfolio has passed 1.8 GW across three projects: the 500 MW Amunet farm in the Gulf of Suez, now operating, plus the 1.1 GW Gulf of Suez project and the Ras Ghareb project, both still under construction. The company has worked in Egypt since 2012. It also named Elalamya General Contracting, the Egyptian civil works firm it first engaged on Amunet in 2023 and has since taken onto the other two sites. Amunet was poured in temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, with concrete scheduled outside the hottest hours and turbine lifts timed against wind speed. Last month PowerChina began work on Sungrow’s battery manufacturing plant at Ain Sokhna, on a 50,000 square metre plot.
Why it matters
Turbines are bought in a global auction. Foundations are poured by whoever is already on that coast with the crews and the batching plant. My read is that the second market is far smaller than the first, and when one contractor builds two projects at once, a single schedule slip can land on two balance sheets.
What it means for MENA
We expect Saudi Arabia and Oman to convert larger wind pipelines into construction next. I think their sponsor lists will look nothing alike and their contractor lists may look almost identical. Egypt is where that shows up first, because Egypt has two of these sites under construction with the same contractor and the same civil works subcontractor.
