Egypt to remove electricity subsidies in 5 years: Minister

CAIRO – 6 July 2017: Egypt has reduced the subsidies on electricity to LE 20 billion ($1.17 billion) and will totally remove them in a 5-year term, said Minister Mohamed Shaker in a press conference on Thursday.

Shaker highlighted that reducing the electricity loads used to have a negative effect in the past on all fields.

The minister noted that during the heat wave few days ago, the maximum electricity load was used and the Ministry was able to overcome the energy problems using the available loads.

Egypt has suffered from increasingly frequent power cuts in past years, which have not only hit households, but seriously limited the production capacity of energy-intensive industries such as fertilizers and cement.

A slowdown in the production of natural gas, the main fuel used in power plants, following Egypt’s 2011 revolution exacerbated the energy shortage.

By 2018, all the units of the under construction electricity plants will be in force, Shaker announced.

In June 2015, Siemens was awarded building three power plants in Egypt with the cooperation of the local partners Orascom Construction and Elsewedy Electric.

After completion in May 2018, the three plants will boost Egypt's power generation capacity by 45 percent.

“The first phase of the megaproject in Egypt has been finalized. The promised goal of bringing 4.4 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity to the grid has even been exceeded, and 4.8 gigawatts are already connected to the grid. The surplus capacity of 400 megawatts is sufficient to supply more than one million people in Egypt with electricity,” Siemens published on its website in January.

A new combined-cycle power plant (CCPP) is being also developed in the new capital of Egypt by Cairo Electricity Production Company (CEPC), a subsidiary of the Egyptian Electricity Holding Company (EEHC) with a capacity of 4,800 megawatts (MW) and is scheduled to become fully operational in the first half of 2018.