Morocco has officialized the project to build the wind farm of Jbel Lahdid, near Essaouira, along the country’s Atlantic coast.
Moroccan energy company Nareva Holding and Italian renewable energy corporation Enel Green Power will co-manage the wind farm.
Morocco’s National Office for Electricity and Drinking Water (ONEE) and the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy (MASEN) signed the project’s contract with the private parties on Thursday, December 31.
Minister of Energy Aziz Rabbah attended the signing ceremony along with several senior Moroccan officials.
The wind farm, set to be located 25 kilometers north of Essaouira, will have a total capacity of 270 megawatts (MW) and require an investment of MAD 2.8 billion ($314 million).
The project falls within Morocco’s Integrated Wind Program, which seeks to build wind farms with a total capacity of 850 MW by 2023.
The Jbel Lahdid wind farm is the program’s third project, after the wind farms in Midelt and Boujdour, with capacities of 210 MW and 300 MW respectively. Nareva Holding and Enel Green Power are also set to build a fourth wind farm in Tarfaya, southern Morocco.
The Moroccan-Italian consortium earned the right to design, finance, build, operate, and manage the wind farms under Morocco’s Integrated Wind Program after winning a call for tenders in 2016.
The ambitious program is expected to save approximately 2.38 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions every year — the equivalent of annual emissions from a city the size of Casablanca.
The Integrated Wind Program is part of Morocco’s vision for the promotion of renewable energy, seeking to make at least 52% of the installed electrical power production in the country based on renewable energy by 2030.
