POWER November 2021 - 13

GLOBAL MONITOR
celin Massila Akendengue, GPC's general
director. " This project will play an important
role in bridging this deficit, and some
600,000 people will ultimately benefit
from a more sustainable and economical
electricity supply delivered to SEEG. The
plant will replace rented generation assets
by SEEG and bring significant benefits, in
line with Gabon sustainability ambitions. "
Wärtsilä has developed several projects on
the African continent; the company in the
September announcement said its fleet in
West Africa includes 440 plants with 946
power generating units, with nearly 5 GW
of generation capacity.
GE Unit Supporting Wind Farm in
Morocco. GE Renewable Energy in late
September announced the company was
selected by Energie Eolienne du Maroc,
a leading developer of wind projects and a
wholly owned subsidiary of Nareva Holding,
to supply 40 onshore wind turbines
for the 200-MW Aftissat onshore wind
farm extension in Morocco. The project
features Cypress model, 5-MW turbines,
which have a rotor diameter of 158 meters.
GE's scope of work also includes a
20-year full-service contract. The project
is expected to come online in 2023 and
is intended to support industrial companies
under power purchase agreements,
in line with Morocco's goal to install 52%
of renewable energy capacity by 2030.
The deal marks the first order in Morocco
for GE's Cypress onshore wind platform,
the company's largest onshore wind turbine
in the field, and GE's largest Cypress
wind farm in the Middle East and Africa
region. This also adds to GE Renewable
Energy's 287 MW of installed base and
backlog in Morocco, which includes the
200-MW Akhfenir wind farm that Nareva
and GE built together in 2016. Morocco
since 2009 has adopted an energy policy
that puts an emphasis on renewable resources,
primarily solar and wind energy.
Quinbrook Acquires UK Solar-PlusStorage
Project. Quinbrook Infrastructure
Partners, a global investment
manager focused exclusively on renewables,
storage, and grid support infrastructure
investment, in late September
said it had acquired a consented 350-MW
solar-plus-storage project in Kent, UK, and
expects construction to begin in the first
half of 2022. The Project Fortress facility,
once operational, is expected to be the
largest single-site solar PV installation in
the UK, and is more than three times the
size of the UK's next-largest consented
solar PV project. The addition of battery
storage to large-scale solar generation
at Fortress is designed to provide critical
support to improve security and reliability
for the UK power grid and help continue
the UK's sustainable drive to net-zero
carbon emissions. The Fortress project
was granted development consent by the
UK's Secretary of State for Business, Energy,
and Industrial Strategy in May 2020.
Fortress includes an extensive landscape
and biodiversity management plan, designed
in collaboration with Natural England,
Kent Wildlife Trust, RSPB, and the
Environment Agency, that will add more
than 3.5 kilometers of native hedgerow
screen planting across the site and seek
to deliver a net gain of 65% in biodiversity.
Quinbrook plans to apply several
progressive innovations at Fortress for
real-time measurement and reporting of
carbon emissions in the UK power grid,
and the 24/7 tracing and tracking of the
renewable provenance of the power sold
to the project's off-takers. ■
-Darrell Proctor is a senior associate
editor for POWER.
November 2021 | POWER
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POWER November 2021

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