The fund’s financing “will mobilize an additional 4.85 billion dollars from other sources, to accelerate global deployment of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP),” said the bank in a statement.
The Clean Technology fund will invest in the CSP programs of five countries in the Middle East and North Africa: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia.
The World Bank also said “The proposed gigawatt-scale deployment through 11 commercial-scale power plants over a three- to five-year time-frame would provide the critical mass of investments necessary to attract significant private sector interest, benefit from economies of scale to reduce cost, result in learning in diverse operating conditions, and manage risk,”
The Clean Technology Fund, a multidonor trust fund to facilitate deployment of low-carbon technologies “at scale,” approved an investment plan that will produce “about one gigawatt” of CSP generation capacity, amounting to a tripling of worldwide CSP capacity, the World Bank said.
Shamshad Akhtar, World Bank Regional Vice President of the Middle East and North Africa, said “This is a most strategic and significant initiative for MENA countries. The initiative would leverage energy diversification, while promoting Euro-Mediterranean integration to the benefit of MENA countries that will be able to exploit one of the major untapped sources of energy. This endeavor is far-reaching with global objectives, implications, and potential impact. It will facilitate faster and greater diffusion of this technology in this region which holds significant potential for CSP”.
Potential for Green House Gas (GHG) reduction: The proposed projects will avoid about 1.7 million tons of carbon dioxide per year from the energy sectors of the countries. If the program is successful and replicated, the global benefits will be far larger. The transformational objective of this investment plan is served by accelerating cost reduction for a technology that could become least-cost globally, and then be replicated in other countries with high GHG emissions.
The results indicators for the investment plan are: GHG reductions of at least 1.7 million tons of CO2-equivalent per year, approximately 900 MW of installed CSP capacity by 2020, $4.85 billion of co-financing mobilized, including sufficient concessional financing to ensure viability of CSP plants, and cost of typical solar field in US$ per m2 is expected to decline over the life of the program.
