Climate & Energy · North Africa
Maghreb solar procurement heats up as Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria push utility-scale bids
From a Moroccan pre-qualification round to Tunisian licences and Algerian Sonelgaz awards, North Africa’s solar pipeline is moving — with storage starting to appear in tender design.
CAIRO — North Africa’s utility-scale solar story in 2025–26 is not a single regional auction. It is three national procurement machines — Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria — moving in parallel, with private developers chasing megawatts that will only matter if grid connection and offtake contracts keep pace.
Morocco opens the next pre-qualification gate
In late October 2026, Morocco opened pre-qualification for at least 350 MW of ground-mounted solar, according to trade reporting by pv magazine. Pre-qualification is not an award. It is the filter before bids, and AB24 will treat shortlisted consortia as news only when the ministry or offtaker publishes them.
Morocco’s solar build-out has long been a reference point for African renewable auctions. The practical questions for this round are familiar: local-content expectations, land and grid-connection timelines, and whether storage is bundled or left to a later tender.
Tunisia: licences issued, storage tenders follow
Tunisia’s pipeline has two public markers. In March 2025, pv magazine reported that Tunis had greenlit about 500 MW of solar, with named international developers in the mix and commercial operation targeted from around 2027. Separately, Tunisian PPP authorities have run a 2026 call for a photovoltaic plant with battery storage at Bazma–Kébili — on the order of 300 MW solar paired with roughly 150 MW / 540 MWh of BESS in trade-press accounts of the concession tender.
That storage add-on matters beyond Tunisia. It signals that Maghreb offtakers are starting to buy firming, not only daytime kilowatt-hours — a design choice Cape Town and Johannesburg energy desks will recognise from their own grid debates.
Algeria’s Sonelgaz lots
Algeria’s multi-year Sonelgaz Energies Renouvelables programme, launched around a 2,000 MW solar envelope in 2023, continued awarding lots into 2025. French trade-promotion reporting summarised final-lot awards totalling hundreds of megawatts across sites such as Kenadsa, Touggourt and Temacine, with Chinese and local contractors among winners. Exact tariff tables and commercial operation dates remain project-specific; AB24 is not publishing invented LCOEs.
What ties the Maghreb together
Industrial buyers in Europe still look south for renewable electrons and green molecules. Maghreb governments still need domestic capacity to cut fuel import bills and evening peaks. Between those pressures sits the unglamorous work of auction design: bankable PPAs, currency clauses, and grid codes that do not strand a plant behind an unfinished substation.
For AB24’s Cairo business desk, the discipline is to name the country, the authority, the megawatts and the date — and to resist blending three procurements into one fictional “Maghreb auction.” The region is hot. The paperwork is national.
Local-content rules are the quiet variable in every Maghreb tender. Governments want factories and jobs, not only imported modules bolted to desert racks. Developers want bankable equipment supply. The compromise often appears in scoring matrices that AB24 will quote only when the tender documents are public.
Grid-connection risk remains the other half of the story. A awarded plant that waits years for a substation is a stranded asset with a ribbon-cutting photo. That is why storage-linked tenders in Tunisia and connection timelines in Morocco deserve as much ink as headline megawatts.
Cairo’s business desk also watches whether Maghreb solar begins to compete with — or complement — Gulf and European offtake ambitions. Export-oriented renewable projects can pull capital; domestic peak demand can pull politics. The auctions that survive are usually the ones that serve a named offtaker with a payable tariff.
AB24’s next updates will name winning consortia only after official award notices, and will keep Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco in separate graphs unless a genuine regional mechanism appears. For now, the heat is real, and it is national.
Sources: pv magazine (Morocco pre-qual, Oct 2026; Tunisia 500 MW, Mar 2025); PV Tech / Tunisian IGPPP tender materials on Bazma–Kébili solar-plus-storage; Team France Export / Sonelgaz award summaries, 2025. Bidder lists and tariffs only as published by named outlets or authorities.
— AB24 · Cairo