Mass wind deployment in Egypt: the transformative energy hub among three continents

Abstract

Wind Energy is occupying more and more space of the energy mix in most of the world. In this work, the challenges for distributed projects in communities and industrial areas are presented for Egypt and a comparison with the mass wind onshore and offshore deployment is unavoidable. In Egypt, there are plans to installed large-scale projects, but the development pace is slow. Furthermore, while the Egypt wind atlas provides ample information to properly plan and deploy wind farms, developers of distributed wind would probably have never analysed small scale sites, which may lead them to make mistakes while siting, and thus a project may end up losing money. Two use cases were selected for analysis: industrial & offshore sites and community/residential sites. It was revealed via a detailed spatial analysis that there are abundant wind resources and potential in high wind – high gain selected areas of almost 40 GW of onshore and offshore wind projects that could make Egypt a unique energy hub between Africa, Europe and the Middle East.