On March 19, the African Development Bank (AfDB) and World Bank convened a workshop with representatives of Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia in Rabat, Morocco to review and upgrade the region’s path-breaking regional Investment Plan for Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), with funding from the Climate Investment Funds (CIF).
The workshop presented an important opportunity for the five countries to discuss ways to deepen their effective use of CSP as a means to transform their national and regional energy paths, with support from their development partners.
In 2009, recognizing their region’s enormous potential for tapping into CSP, they had agreed on an unprecedented Investment Plan for regional CSP development to generate 1 Gigawatt (GW) power and triple worldwide capacity, and had received a commitment for $750 million by the CIF’s Clean Technology Fund (CTF).
The Investment Plan was designed around deployment of about 10–12 commercial scale power plants to be constructed over a 3–5 year time frame. Now, in light of subsequent political and technological developments in the region, the countries and their partners have come together again to update and revise the Plan to better suit their countries’ current circumstances and consider advances in solar technology.
In the workshop, participants met in four sessions to consider:
At the end of the workshop, participants agreed to the following set of next steps:
SOURCE / African Development Bank Group