ACWA Power International reported on Sunday a storage failure at one of the solar power plants operated in Morocco, costing the company approximately $47 million. The 150-megawatt plant (Noor III), which is part of the Noor Ouarzazate solar complex, will remain inactive until November 2024, the Saudi Stock Exchange website said.
According to the source, this outage illustrates the recurrence of technical problems at the concentrated solar power plant (CSP). In the summer of 2021, outages halted production for a year, two sources recalled to Reuters last month. The company assured us that it would resolve the problem and consider building a new storage tank.
In a 2020 report, the news agency said Morocco’s Economic, Social, and Environmental Council recommended completely abandoning CSP due to its high cost compared to photovoltaic and wind energy.
Furthermore, it also recalls that Morocco aims for renewable energies to represent 52% of installed capacity by 2030, compared to 37.6% currently. The country is already lagging in solar energy, with only 831 megawatts (MW) installed so far, out of the 2,000 MW initially planned for 2020. Wind energy has made up part of the deficit.
