From pv magazine International.
Afghanistan’s Ministry of Energy & Water has issued a tender for a 40 MW solar project at an unspecified location in Herat province, in the northern part of the country.
The project will be developed under the World Bank’s Scaling Solar initiative with the backing of the multilateral lender’s private finance arm the International Finance Corporation (IFC).
The plant will be built on a public-private partnership basis with the selected developer securing the right to develop, finance, construct, own, operate, maintain and transfer the facility, the Afghan government stated in the tender document.
Interested bidders have until November 5 to pre-qualify for the procurement exercise.
2020 solar ambition
The project is part of the country’s plan to deploy 500 MW of solar generation capacity by next year. That ambition includes other tendered plants such as a 40 MW facility at the Hisar-e-Shahi Industrial Park in Nanagrahar. In May 2018, a previous 40 MW solar tender – held by the IFC for a project at the same industrial park – was awarded to Chinese battery manufacturer Shuangdeng Group for almost $60 million (Rs424 crore).
The Ministry of Energy & Water issued a series of tenders for hybrid solar plants last year. The last, in June, was for a 5 MW facility and those plants followed tenders for three hybrid solar projects – with a total capacity of 65 MW – in September 2017. The earlier three projects, together with the 5 MW hybrid project in Ghor, are part of a plan approved by Afghanistan’s High Economic Council in March 2017 to deploy 65 MW of hybrid projects.
Afghanistan’s renewable energy policy aims for 4-5 GW of new generation capacity by 2030.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.