Mass wind deployment in Egypt: the transformative energy hub among three continents

Wind energy occupies a great chunk of the energy mix in most parts of the world. In this study, the challenges for distributed projects in communities and industrial areas are presented for Egypt and a comparison between the mass wind onshore and offshore deployment is unavoidable. In Egypt, plans have been devised to install large-scale projects, but the pace of development is slow. Furthermore, while the wind atlas of Egypt provides ample information on planning and deploying wind farms, developers of distributed wind would probably have never analysed small-scale sites, which may lead them to ignore the drawbacks while discussing the project and they may thereby end up losing money. Two cases used were selected for the analysis: industrial and offshore sites and community/residential sites. A detailed spatial analysis revealed that there are abundant wind resources and hidden potential in selected high wind-high gain areas of almost 40 GW of onshore and offshore wind projects that could make Egypt a unique energy hub among Africa, Europe and the Middle East.