Tunisian prime minister Youssef Chahed has officially commissioned the country’s first large-scale solar park, the 10 MW Tozeur I solar facility.
The project is owned by Tunisian state-owned utility Société tunisienne de l’électricité et du gaz (STEG), and is located near Tozeur, in the south of the country.
STEG kicked off the tender for the project in 2014. Italian solar developer Ternienergia, won the €12.5 million EPC contract for the project in March 2017.
The €16 million project was financed by German development bank KFW, under Tunisia’s Plan Solaire Tunisien (PST) program. KFW provided a €12 million low-interest rate loan for the plant's construction, and a further €0.5 million for additional services related to the project.
A twin project is coming
STEG is also currently developing another 10 MW solar park in the area, the Centrale Photovoltaique Tozeur II. The tender for this project was issued by the company in December 2017.
Both Tozeur projects are the only large-scale solar plants being developed in the country outside of the government's tender mechanism, which includes two separate 70 MW tenders for projects up to 10 MW, and a unique tender for 500 MW of larger solar parks. Preliminary results of this tender indicate surprisingly low bids, the lowest coming in at $0.0244/kWh. Projects selected in all of these auctions are expected to sell power to STEG under a long-term PPA.
Under its renewable energy strategy, Tunisia aims at achieving 4.7 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.