China wants BRI to become greener; less coal-fired plants and more renewable energy. One green-energy BRI project is the Aysha Wind Farm project in Ethiopia. This project was originally agreed on in 2013, the same year as BRI was announced, but work began only in earnest in 2018 and saw further delays due to Covid-19. Late last month, Chinese state media said the project was 75% completed, and will be operational in late 2022 [BRI wind farm bringing green energy to Ethiopia].
Over the years, the Aysha Wind Farm project has been revised several times. The current $257 million project is for an installed capacity of 120 megawatts (MW) and an energy output of 467 gigawatt hours per year. Further in the future, Ethiopia wants to expand the project to 300 MW and eventually to a thousand.
The Aysha Wind Farm is located in the desert near the town of Aysha in north-east Ethiopia, just 40 kilometers south of he border with Djibouti and 20 kilometers west of the border with Somalia. Aysha lies on the Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway, largely constructed by China, and on the Addis Ababa–Djibouti roadway. The security situation in the area is volatile, with protesters blocking both the road and railways in July after a militia attack that left dozens death.
The formal owner of the Aysha Wind Farm is state-owned Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP), and the main constructor is state-owned Dongfang Electric Corporation (DEC), based in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. The project is financed by the Exim Bank of China (85%) and the Ethiopian government (15%).
When operational, part of the generated electricity will go directly into Ethiopia's power grid to alleviate general power shortages. However, the main intended use is to power the Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway and the Ethiopia-Djibouti Economic Corridor. The latter is a network of infrastructure and economic zones connecting Ethiopia with the port in Djibouti, where China has a fast-expanding military base and where it operates the Djibouti International Free Trade Zone (DIFTZ), which it also built.
In short: a Chinese-built wind farm located near a Chinese-built railway that will power that same railway and an economic corridor that includes a port in with a Chinese base and a Chinese-controlled trade zone. All financed or largely financed by China. For the Chinese, this ‘green’ BRI wind farm likely seems very useful indeed.
Tycho de Feijter
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