UAE utility Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has partnered with Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA), one of the world's largest suppliers of aluminium, to provide the metal producer with solar power from the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park.
DEWA claims the deal makes the UAE the first country to start producing aluminium with solar power. EGA’s smelter will be supplied with 56,000GWh of solar each year, which the company claims will be enough to produce 40,000 tonnes of aluminium in its first year. Metal produced through the partnership will be sold under the new name CelestiAL.
The Dubai solar park has an installed PV capacity of just over 1GW, but DEWA hopes to increase this capacity fivefold over the next decade with investments totalling US$13.6 billion. The utility fielded a tariff of US$1.6953 cents per kWh in a tender for a 900MW plot of its Mohammed bin Rashid solar parks in 2019, which it hoped would increase its production capacity to 2,863MW.
The deal was signed remotely by DEWA chief executive and EGA vice chairman Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer and Abdul Nasser, the CEO of EGA. Al Tayer said the agreement brings Dubai closer to reaching targets set out in its Clean Energy Strategy 2050, which includes powering the city through a 75% mix of clean energy sources.
“To achieve these goals,” Al Tayer said, “we have launched many initiatives and projects, most notably the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, which is the largest single-site solar energy project in the world with a capacity of 5,000 megawatts by 2030.”