If 2024 was the year of green hydrogen hype, 2025 was the year the bills came due. Driven not by climate altruism but by a brutal gas crunch and soaring LNG import bills, Egypt’s renewable energy sector underwent a massive, pragmatic correction this year. The dream of exporting green molecules to Europe didn’t die, but it was quietly shelved in favor of a more urgent mandate: Generating enough electrons at home to stop burning expensive gas.

For years, the narrative has been about positioning to become a regional hub, a corridor, an exporter. In 2025, the focus changed. As the government grappled with a gas deficit that threatened industrial output and electricity stability, the energy strategy shifted from growth to security — at least in the near term.

The hydrogen hangover: Goodbye, hub. Hello, fertilizers

Just twelve months ago, policymakers were pitching Egypt as the battery of the world. We had signed 32 MoUs for green hydrogen worth a theoretical USD 175 bn. But by September, the Green Hydrogen Organization confirmed what the market already suspected: Less than five of those projects had moved past feasibility studies.

But European buyers who were supposed to line up for Egyptian green hydrogen were paralyzed by their own regulatory delays and unwilling to pay the green premium after the Trump administration started torpedoing green mandates. The final nail in the “export-first” coffin came in October, when the International Maritime Organization shelved its net-zero framework. This removed the regulatory “stick” that would have forced shipping lines to bunker green fuel in the Suez Canal. Without a mandatory levy on carbon emissions, shipping giants had no economic reason to buy expensive green ammonia at East Port Said.

Does this mean the hydrogen story is dead? No. It means it has recalibrated. The new pragmatism suggests that if we produce green hydrogen at all, it won’t be to save Europe — it will be to feed our own energy-intensive sectors. The Oil Ministry is now quietly prioritizing projects that can replace the gray hydrogen used by heavy industry (chemically identical but produced using natural gas), effectively using the sector to avail gas for the grid.

This domestic pivot isn’t just about saving gas — it’s about saving our non-energy export markets. While the government focused on the energy deficit, the private sector spent 2025 staring down the barrel of the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. With the transitional phase ending this month and financial levies set to kick in for real in January 2026, the threat of a carbon tax on Egyptian exports has moved from theoretical to existential. For Egypt’s heavy industries — fertilizers, steel, cement, and aluminum — reliance on grey hydrogen and the fossil-heavy national grid is now a liability that erodes their margins in Europe.

Wind breaks 3 GW, but the real revolution is in the batteries

Every gigawatt of wind or solar built in 2025 wasn’t a statistic for a climate summit, it was a gigawatt of gas the state didn’t have to import. Wind energy delivered the raw volume, with total installed capacity passing the 3 GW mark this year, a milestone driven by the full commissioning of the Red Sea Wind Energy consortium’s 650 MW Ras Ghareb plant.

For the first time, major projects were engineered not just to generate power, but to store it. The inclusion of battery energy storage systems in headline projects — like Scatec’s 1 GW solar + 200 MWh storage project — marks a fundamental change in strategy. Amea Power just followed suit with financial close on what will become one of our continent’s largest single-site solar energy facilities — with Africa’s largest attached battery energy storage system.

Policymakers have tacitly admitted that we can no longer treat renewables as intermittent luxuries that rely on gas peaker plants for backup. The gas simply isn’t there. By promoting the use of storage, the state is effectively trying to turn solar parks into baseload plants — infrastructure that can keep the lights on even after the sun goes down.

Chinese solar tech, made in Egypt

While generation projects ground through the slow machinery of project finance, the manufacturing sector scored a genuine geopolitical W — by becoming the neutral ground for Chinese industry. Squeezed by trade wars and aggressive tariffs in Western markets, Chinese solar component manufacturers flocked to the SCZone.

Major players like JA Solar developed factories not just to serve the Egyptian market, but to use Made by China in Egypt as a tariff-free backdoor to Europe and the US. The government wisely seized this chance, localizing solar cell production to position Egypt as a key node in the de-risked global supply chain.

The return of pumped storage?

In the search for stability, the government also dusted off one of its oldest files: pumped storage. After years of delay, the Attaqa Mountain pumped storage project is being retendered. Later in the year, the little-known Renergy Group came out with a plan to build a USD 17 bn hybrid renewables project in Sinai with a significant pumped storage component.

But all this progress runs into a single, USD 45 bn wall: The transmission network

The geography of Egypt’s renewables boom is a nightmare for grid planners. We are building massive generation capacity on the Red Sea coast, where the wind is, but our load centers are hundreds of kilometers away in Cairo and the Delta.

We’re solving the supply problem, but we need to work to address the delivery problem. The existing transmission lines are congested, and we lack the high-voltage direct current infrastructure needed to move these new electrons efficiently over long distances.

The government is signalling that it recognizes the challenge, with Investment Minister El Khatib laying out this month the need for USD 45 bn in distribution infrastructure investments to integrate new clean capacity.

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