Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi inaugurated on Monday the Benban Solar Park in Aswan Governorate, Upper Egypt, described as the largest solar power plant in the world.
It was established in partnership with the private sector and specialized international expertise.
Here’s what you need to know about the new park:
- The station is located about 35 km northwest of Aswan in the village of Benban in the Daraw Center.
- It is designed to produce an additional 2000 megawatts of electricity for the unified national grid.
- The site includes 32 solar power plants under construction.
- Each plant has a capacity of 50 megawatts.
- The project includes four transformer stations – Benban (1,2,3,4) – to discharge the energy produced from the solar stations
- The distance between each of the four stations is about 1.5 kilometers.
- Each company or investor has one or two plots of land on which photovoltaic cells are installed, and all of them are connected to stations that, in turn, connect the electricity produced to the unified network.
- The project site was chosen based on studies and reports from NASA and other international scientific institutions, which confirmed the comparative advantage of Aswan in establishing these projects in the solar energy field.
- The Benban solar power plant comes as one of the sources of energy diversification and maximization of the use of renewable energy.
- The project’s production of electricity is equivalent to 90 percent of the energy produced from the High Dam.
