Jordan’s government could have 30MW 60MWh electricity storage plant finished by April 2019

The government of Jordan has given parties interested in delivering a 30MW energy storage system in the Kingdom six months to come up with technical and financial offers.

Following a July 2017 Request for Submissions of Interest (REOI), issued by the country’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (MEMR) on which it was advised by Fichtner, in late December the ministry qualified 23 interested parties to submit further details of their proposals, from a field of 41 interested companies.

The REOI called for the development of energy storage projects in two phases, with the first to be a 30MW / 60MWh electricity storage plant, at a substation in Ma’an currently used to integrate the output of several PV plants onto the grid. The second phase’s scope and size is to be determined.

The phase one plant would be used for ramp-rate control of PV and wind power generators in the local area, to reduce the amount of thermal generation required for spinning reserve and to shift renewable energy generated off-peak to times of peak demand, limiting the amount of grid curtailment required.

Jordan’s National Electric Power Company (NEPC) would be in charge of dispatching power from the plant based on the grid’s requirements while the project company would be operating the plant for 15 years. Phase one is pencilled for completion by April 2019.

National newspaper Jordan Times reported that it had spoken this week with MEMR minister Saleh Kharabsheh, who confirmed that a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been signed with the 23 bidding companies for implementing the project, which it is estimated will cost US$40 million.

Major names are on the list, many of them familiar to readers of both Energy-Storage.News and of our sister site PV Tech. They include Saudi developer ACWA Power, behind some of the lowest priced solar bids in recent times, Japanese companies Marubeni and Itochu, Hanwha Energy from South Korea, Chinese big players in PV TBEA Xinjiang Sunoasis and GCL Intelligence Energy and German renewables company Innogy, which is a subsidiary of utility RWE.

A selection will be made by the government after the six-month window interested companies have been given to make their technical and financial offers elapses.

Jordan signed an MoU with AES Energy Storage in 2015 for the potential deployment of 20MW of energy storage but there have been no announcements regarding progress on that project from either party since then. In August last year, a power purchase agreement (PPA) was signed for the Middle East’s largest solar-plus-storage project to date, 12MW of PV with a 12MWh lithium-ion battery, in a project being executed by Jordanian PV manufacturer and EPC Philadelphia Solar. In the wider Middle East region, analysis firm IHS Markit told Energy-Storage.News in July last year that, partly driven by a desire for dispatchable solar plants, strong growth is expected in the energy storage sector in the years to come. Similarly, Sami Khoreibi, CEO of renewable energy project developer Enviromena wrote in a guest blog for the site that energy storage "will transform" energy markets in the Middle East and Africa in the near future.