Egypt, China’s GCL resume talks over solar panel complex

Egypt’s Ministry of Electricity resumed its negotiations with China’s GCL Group to set up an integrated industrial complex in order to produce solar panels, with a capacity of 5GW.

The Minister of Military Production Mohamed Al-Assar told Daily News Egypt that the ministry was negotiating with Chinese and German companies to install a solar panel production plant in Egypt.

A source from the military production ministry informed DNE that the main reason behind the stalled previous negotiations was that the Chinese company had requested the signing of conditional agreements before contracting. The source said that the Chinese request has not been accepted.

DNE reported in July that the negotiations with the GCL Group had been stalled after the Chinese company made a request that the ministry purchases the factory’s entire production.

The ministry denied the request as the Egyptian market would not absorb 5GW of solar panels per year.

Moreover, exporting opportunities would also be limited due to the spread of other low-cost Chinese products.

Egypt has received a grant from the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development worth KD 200,000 last year to complete the feasibility studies for the solar panels plant, relying on Egyptian silica sand.

According to the ministry, the solar panel complex will be built over five stages, starting with the extraction of pure Egyptian quartz, to the manufacture of silicon metal and poly silicon and the manufacturing of solar cells and panels.

The ministry aims to benefit from the expertise of international companies to localise this technology and meet the needs of the local market of solar cells, as well as export the surplus of production to Arab and African countries.