Islamic Development Bank Mulls $160mn Funding for Egypt-KSA Power Project

The Islamic Development Bank (IDB) is considering a recent request by Egypt for $160 million in funding for its electricity interconnection project with Saudi Arabia, said finance minister Hany Qadry.

The Egyptian minister further stated on Saturday that the upcoming period will witness more cooperation between Egypt and the IDB.

IDB’s executive board will convene next October to review another Egyptian request for $223.2 million in funding for the second phase of upgrading Sharm El-Sheikh airport, Qadry noted.

The electricity project will link Egypt and Saudi Arabia with investments of $1.6 billion. It will include the creation of a transmission line to transfer gas between the two countries at peak times for each country at a maximum of 3,000 MW. The line will have other uses as well, including electricity trade exchange, especially during the winter. This will allow Saudi Arabia to export surplus electricity to its organisations in Egypt.

Earlier last Thursday morning, a huge power outage caused black-outs across Cairo causing major disruption across the city of some 20 million people at the height of the morning rush hour.

Services were completely suspended on one of the city’s three metro lines and heavily disrupted on a second, and the water supplies to households and businesses were also disrupted. The power outage also affected numerous state institutions including state television channels and radio stations which could not air without electricity to run their facilities.

A technical mishap or “glitch caused the national electricity grid to lose around 9,000 megawatts of its generation capacity, leading to power outages in most provinces,” Electricity Minister Mohamed Shaker said.