CAIRO: Egypt is looking to boost its electricity outage in response to recent power cuts that have left parts of the country without light for a number of hours this Ramadan. The country announced that it is accepting bids for the construction of generators with a total capacity of 1,000 megawatts, the energy ministry said on Saturday. With the summer heat and the breaking of the sunrise to sunset fast, power capacity has hit a wall in Egypt, with consumption growing dramatically in the Arab world's largest country. This prompted the ministry to call for new generators to be built in order to rectify the problem facing families. According to the ministry, the country could spend over 3 billion Egyptian pounds ($600 million) on the plan that will add 8 gas generators of 125 MW each. Officials told the state-owned al-Gomhuria newspaper that they hope to have all of them online by next summer ahead of the heat. “We are opening the bids up for invitations to companies that would be able to complete these projects,” said ministry spokesman Aktham Aboul Ela in comments to Bikya Masr. “The tenders will begin this week.” Egypt currently has some 25,000 megawatts of power capacity and intends to spend $100-120 billion to triple capacity by 2027. BM
