Egypt's oil minister Tarek el-Molla said Wednesday that the country is on course to achieve its goal of delivering 42pc of its energy needs from renewables well before the 2035 target set out in its existing energy strategy.
"A few years back, we sat and put together a strategy to have 42pc of our energy mix from renewables by the year 2035," el-Molla said at an event on the sidelines of the Cop 27 UN climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. But "I think with the advancement of technology, we will reach this figure of 42pc perhaps earlier than 2035, perhaps by 2030," he said.
Egypt was previously aiming to generate 40pc of its enegy demand from renewables by 2030. Egypt generated just shy of 10pc from renewables in 2019, according to OECD energy watchdog the IEA.
The Egyptian government is in the middle of updating its energy strategy to reflect not just the advancements in technology but also the emergence of newer, lower-carbon alternative energies like hydrogen in the global energy mix, el-Molla said. "We've seen that the energy mix should include many things, including nuclear. And this is part of what Egypt has already started including in our energy mix," he said.
In July Russia's state-owned nuclear company Rosatom formally began work on the construction of Egypt's first ever nuclear power plant at El-Dabaa, northwest of the capital Cairo, more than six years after Egypt and Moscow first agreed to build the plant. It will comprise four 1.2GW units and cost upwards of $20bn to construct.
