Terra Sola, the Bahraini Group for solar power generation, is leaving Morocco less than two years after setting foot in Casablanca.
After announcing several major solar energy projects, the group specialized in the development and operation of solar photovoltaic plants has just liquidated its Moroccan subsidiary Terra Sola Morocco.
Founded in 2010, the company is an investor and developer for integrated PV power projects with a mandate to operate in the MENA region. Terra Sola’s decision to withdraw from Morocco comes in contradiction with the announcement that followed its arrival in the Kingdom.
Back in 2015, Terra Sola’s Swiss president announced the construction of more than 16 photovoltaic stations in Morocco with a unit capacity of 25 MW. This project was to make Terra Sola the top supplier of electricity based on solar energy behind the Moroccan Agency of Solar Energy (Masen).
To date, nothing of the company’s program has been implemented. What could have pushed the group listed on the Berlin stock exchange to backtrack on such ambitious projects, ones qualifying as “structuring” which it had announced as one of its main development axes in the years to come?
Admittedly, Terra Sola was unable to go beyond the pre-qualification stage for the market launched by Masen for the development of the photovoltaic component of the solar program Noor (Noor PV1).
Why? The answer could lie in the complicated legal process facing the private company. Since the enactment in 2011 of law 13-09 on renewable energies (ENR), a “solar card” has had to be implemented by the regulatory authorities in order to guide private investors towards potentially exploitable areas.
To this day, however, this has not been acted upon. Several developers are still in the starting blocks, hence the absence of any closing to date of a solar station on the part of a private operator.
