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IRAN: The Iranian government has signed a memorandum of understanding with an unnamed Danish company to build the country's first privately owned wind and solar power plant.

The plant will be built near Damghan, in Semnan province, to the east of Tehran, as part of a project totaling up to 1GW to be built in ten phases of around 100MW each.

Construction of the first phase is expected to start "in the near future," the Iran Daily newspaper reports. According to the paper, financing will come from a German investor.

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It is not clear how much of the 1GW will be wind energy. However, the paper states that under Iran's Five-Year Economic Development Plan (2010-15) the country aims to add 5GW of wind and solar capacity by 2016, with wind accounting for 90% of this figure.

 

To date, Iran has 92MW of installed capacity, while the potential resource could exceed 15GW, according to the energy ministry.

The Iran Daily also reports that private investors have submitted applications for wind power projects  with a total capacity of 800MW.

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