- The Global Landscape of Energy Transition Finance 2025 report highlighted ongoing challenges for major renewable energy projects in Morocco.
- The report also looked at the Noor Midelt project, which has an 800 MW capacity and is facing significant construction delays.
The Global Landscape of Energy Transition Finance 2025 report highlighted ongoing challenges for major renewable energy projects in Morocco, especially in the solar thermal sector, despite growing global investments in clean energy.
Issued by the International Renewable Energy Agency and the Climate Policy Initiative, the report said Morocco’s thermal energy projects are facing increasing competition from solar photovoltaic (PV) with battery storage, which is seen as a cheaper option.
This shift is already visible in the country’s flagship projects, including the Noor Ouarzazate plant. With a capacity of 150 MW, the plant had repeated technical faults and storage failures in 2024, causing about 9 months of downtime and losses of around $47 million.
The report also looked at the Noor Midelt project, which has an 800 MW capacity and is facing significant construction delays. Negotiations are underway to change the original design, based on concentrated solar power (CSP), to use solar PV and/or battery storage as a cheaper alternative.
For Noor Midelt 2 and 3, the report stated that both projects progressed in 2024 as PV-plus-battery projects, rather than the originally planned hybrid CSP-PV technology.
This shows Morocco is shifting toward faster, cheaper, and more established solar PV technology, even for projects first planned as CSP. The report also pointed to the role of international financing.
Between 2014 and 2018, the MENA region, including Morocco, saw a rise in impact-driven funding from multilateral and European development banks, mainly targeting PV projects.
Renewable energy investment in the region grew 62 per cent between 2022–2023 and 2024, reaching $21 billion, or 2.6 per cent of global flows. However, the report emphasised that further investment is necessary to achieve global energy transition targets.
It concluded that Morocco and the wider MENA region face a key challenge, which is adapting financial and regulatory frameworks to keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies, secure energy through storage, and manage the high operational risks of large-scale projects.