The €250m ($337.8m) Kuraymat installation is the first in a pipeline of similar integrated-solar-combined-cycle (ISCC) projects being pursued by the Egyptian government, using a hybrid of solar-thermal and gas-fired combined cycle technologies.

Egypt’s New and Renewable Energy Authority – a division of its electricity ministry – is building the project 100km south of Cairo. Egypt is tailor made for solar-thermal projects, thanks to its vast swathes of flat and thinly populated desert, its relatively modern grid infrastructure, and its reliable supply of water from the Nile River and Red Sea.

Kuraymat will have a generation capacity of 150 megawatts (MW), with 20MW coming from the solar array. The project is expected to generate 852 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity per year, with solar accounting for 4% of the total.

The solar components have been supplied by Cologne-based Flagsol, which is jointly owned by Germany’s Solar Millennium and Ferrostaal, while all building work is being undertaken in co-operation with Egyptian construction firm Orascom.

Klaas Rühmann, who is managing the project for Flagsol, calls Kuraymat a “reference project” for North Africa’s sweeping solar ambitions, marking a critical step on the pathway to the Desertec Initiative.

In total, nearly 2,000 solar-thermal collectors covering 130,000 sq m have been assembled and installed. The developers anticipate that the heat-transfer circuit for the entire solar field will be finished by the end of April, and the entire project will be commissioned by August 2010. Flagsol and Orascom will operate the solar park for two years once it is finished, before handing it over to the government.

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