Engazaat is building Egypt’s first commercial-scale agrivoltaics pilot at Nuweiba in South Sinai, backed by EUR 4 mn from the Flanders International Climate Action Programme — with a Marsa Matrouh follow-up ten times the size already in the pipeline, regional COO Dina Kafafi tells EnterpriseAM.

The big question: Run in partnership with Brussels-based energy consultancy 3E, ORG, and the Flemish government, the project will deliver its first indicative results in September and will answer a key question: can agrivoltaics — solar panels mounted above farmland so crops and electricity share the same plot — survive Egyptian conditions?

Why it matters: The pilot is the first serious test of an idea Egypt’s policymakers have been bouncing around for years. The country wants to expand agricultural output, reclaim land, and improve food security while running into harder water constraints every year. Agrivoltaics promises to do three things at once — generate power, shade crops to reduce evaporation, and squeeze more revenue per feddan. IFC modelling suggests dual-use systems can cut water consumption by up to 29%, though the report (pdf) is clear that the figure depends heavily on crop type and system design. The Egyptian-conditions test is what’s missing — and Nuweiba is the first attempt to fill it.

This isn’t about needing more solar. Egypt already runs some of the region’s largest solar parks and added 0.7 GW of installed solar capacity in 2025, taking the total to 3.3 GW, according to an IEA report (pdf). The agrivoltaics conversation is about land and water, not MWs.

The Nuweiba site is testing three metrics — water efficiency, crop productivity, and land-use efficiency — across three growing seasons, Kafafi tells us. The project will trial a mix of cash crops, fruits, and vegetables, including tomatoes and onions. The Marsa Matrouh follow-up would be among the largest agrivoltaics deployments in the region if it proceeds, she adds.

The industry is split on whether it can work. “Agrivoltaics is academically compelling, but it sits well outside our commercial reality in Egypt,” Karm Holding CTO Akram Ismail tells us. “The demand we consistently see from agricultural clients centres on reliable, round-the-clock energy for irrigation and operations, not dual-use solar-crop configurations.”

The cost stack is Karm’s central argument. Elevated agrivoltaic structures cost at least 20% more than conventional ground-mounted solar, depending on design and crop type. For Egyptian agricultural operators already facing high financing costs, the additional capex is hard to justify. The bigger problem, Ismail says, is what comes before the solar conversation: “In our operating areas, drilling a single water well costs no less than EGP 12 mn. That capital burden alone breaks the economic case before any conversation about the additional cost of an elevated, specialised agrivoltaic structure begins.”

But Kafafi argues that agrivoltaics is being priced against the wrong benchmark. Treating it as a standalone power project misses the point; the value comes from bundling power, water, and land productivity into one infrastructure asset. The economics, she argues, become legible when “the hedge on renewables becomes a hedge on macroeconomics too, not just power.”

The barriers could also be largely institutional: “The technology economics are favorable, but the governance and finance architecture is the gating issue — permitting authority, tariff design, taxation of dual streams, and land-tenure protocols for multi-decade contracting,” Egyptian Agrivoltaics Initiative (EAI) founder Zeinab Hafez tells EnterpriseAM, noting that scaling requires inter-ministerial coordination, climate- finance-ready documentation, contracting models for productive farmland, and a well-documented national pilot with verified yield, energy, water, and economic data.

EAI is Egypt's first dedicated governance and ESG architecture for true agrivoltaics on

productive farmland. The initiative focuses on the institutional side of deployment, including governance protocols, ESG and monitoring frameworks, inter-ministerial coordination models, and land-tenure protocols, Hafez tells us.

SOUND SMART- Agrivoltaics works on two layers: elevated panels generate electricity above, while crops grow underneath in partial shade. The shading reduces soil evaporation and heat stress on the crops; the crops, in turn, cool the panels — solar panels lose efficiency as temperatures climb, so shaded ground can lift generation yields. Global capacity sits somewhere between 2.8 GW and 14 GW, the IFC report estimates, with the wide range reflecting how new and under-measured the asset class still is.

REMEMBER- EgyptERA suspended the existing net metering system in late December and paused new rules in January after pushback from solar developers. The framework is still under review. Net metering doesn’t determine whether agrivoltaics works technically, but it does determine whether anyone will pay for it — and on Ismail’s read, layering agrivoltaics on top of an unresolved net metering regime “multiplies risk without proportionally multiplying return.”

Our take: Karm and Engazaat are solving different problems — and they're both right. Karm is sizing agrivoltaics against the unit economics of standalone solar-for-irrigation — a model that already works and is already cheap. Engazaat is sizing it against a broader question of what kind of land-use our water-stressed economy can sustain over the next decade. The September results will tell us whether the integrated-infrastructure argument has data behind it or remains a useful framing exercise.

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