Power Station "grows" on the Egypt Desert

     Just after 9 am, the Aswan Desert in southern Egypt was hot. Islam Abdul Rahim has been working for five hours, and he has to get through the task before the heat. Islam is full of energy, because he is working with his Chinese colleagues to turn the abundant sunshine of his hometown into precious electricity.

     Islam is an Egyptian engineer of the 186 MW photovoltaic power generation project of the bantam photovoltaic industrial park undertaken by TBEA Xinjiang New Energy Co., Ltd. (referred to as TBEA). After the project was fully connected to the grid at the end of March, most of the workers had already withdrawn. Today, only a dozen people such as Islam are responsible for the follow-up work of data monitoring.

     This is the first photovoltaic power project in Egypt that was built and financed by Chinese companies. The project started construction in April 2018. The photovoltaic industrial park in this area covers an area of 37 square kilometers. The total installed capacity of the industrial park is expected to reach nearly 2,000 megawatts this year. It is expected to become one of the largest photovoltaic industry parks in the world. Egypt's goal of increasing renewable energy generation in 2020 to 20% of total power generation is achieved.

    “Egypt is very rich in solar energy resources and is especially suitable for photovoltaic power generation,” said Gu Huchen, who is responsible for engineering management at TBEA. Although the resources are abundant, the construction difficulty is beyond his expectations. “Our peak installation period is in the high temperature month, the surface temperature can reach above 65 degrees Celsius, and the construction difficulty increases geometrically.”

     After adjustment, Gu Huchen's project department set the working time between 4 am to 11 am. In order to catch up with the construction period, Gu Huchen can only increase manpower and motivate employees through incentives. He introduced that there were about 1,500 Egyptian workers and engineers at the peak.

   “In the whole construction process, we have added at least 5,000 jobs to the local area.” Gu Huchen said, “Egypt is our stronghold. We have offices, branches and subsidiaries here. We will continue to promote in Egypt in the future. Photovoltaic power generation system, and radiated to countries such as Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan."

     Islam, 30, is one of the Egyptian engineers of the project. After graduating from the Aswan Institute for Advanced Energy, Islam served in the military for three years and then worked for a period of time in the Egyptian Ministry of Power to follow up on renewable energy projects.

    “After I completed the work of the Ministry of Electric Power, I was looking for a job. Later I saw the job advertisement of TBEA in this class on the Internet. This is the first large-scale solar project in Egypt. I believe that Egyptian engineers, workers and technicians will follow me. I have gained a lot of experience," said Islam.

     In addition to work, Islam has also harvested many good memories. He and his Chinese colleagues celebrate birthdays, chat with them, learn to play table tennis with them, play football and basketball together.

    "We also learned some simple Chinese. My Chinese colleagues also learned some Arabic. When some Chinese colleagues returned to China to complete the mission, I felt very sad, but we can also contact via WeChat." Islam said.

     After the project was completely over, Islam intends to continue studying for a while. “In the future, I will try to work with more Chinese companies to gain more experience and make more good friends.”