Saudi Arabia and Egypt to complete power grid link in 2017

• 8 years ago (2016-11-16)
• David Flin

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Mohamed Shaker, the Egyptian Minister of Electricity, has announced that Egypt and Saudi Arabia will complete a project to link their electricity grids in 2017. Saudi Arabia and Egypt had signed a £1.05 billion agreement in 2013 to link their electricity grids, to allow power trading between the two countries.

The Egyptian parliament has approved the electricity interconnection loan agreement with the Kuwaiti Fund for Arab Economic Development. The parliamentary report said: “The fund will provide 30 million Kuwaiti dinars ($100 million) in a loan to be used for implementing this landmark project, which will become a key hub in the Arab electricity grid.” According to the report, the two electricity grids will be interconnected via three stations, one in Egypt in the city of Badr, and the other two in the Saudi Arabian cities of Medina and Tabuk.

The report said: “These three stations will be linked via aerial cables and naval cables in the Gulf of Aqaba, and will help interconnect the two electricity grids of the two countries and boost their total power generation capacity to over 90,000 MW, and they will represent the two biggest electricity grids in the Arab world.”