Morocco, Spain Pledge to Consolidate their Energy Cooperation

Rabat – Minister of Energy, Mining and the Environment, Aziz Rabbah, held talks on Monday with vice-president of the Spanish government and minister of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera Rodriguez, on ways of consolidating bilateral cooperation in the energy field.

During this meeting held by videoconference, the two ministers praised the excellent bilateral cooperation relations between Morocco and Spain, part of a vision of regional integration that places the Kingdom and this European country as two points of connection between Europe and Africa, said Tuesday a statement by the ministry of Energy, Mining and the Environment.

They also discussed opportunities for cooperation in the field of energy in the light of global changes in the energy sector, including energy transition, the increased use of clean and renewable energies and the opening of energy markets.

In this regard, both sides raised several issues of common interest, such as power system planning, electricity interconnection between the two countries and the natural gas partnership, as well as the implementation of the Joint Declaration of the roadmap on renewable electricity trade “Sustainable Electricity Trade Roadmap-SET Roadmap”, signed between Morocco, Spain, Portugal, France and Germany, on the sidelines of the 22nd Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 22), held in Marrakech in November 2016.

With regard to electricity interconnection, the two ministers agreed to activate the implementation of the memorandum of understanding on the development of a third Morocco-Spain electricity interconnection, signed during the meeting in Morocco of HM King Mohammed VI with King Philip VI of Spain in February 2019.

Concerning the roadmap on electricity trade, the two officials stressed the need to intensify consultations between experts from the two countries in order to speed up actions to integrate the short-, medium- and long-term renewable electricity markets of the signatory countries of the Joint Declaration, in the presence of the European Commission, in particular through the finalization and signing, in the coming weeks, of the memorandum of understanding defining the rules and procedures necessary for the conclusion of bilateral contracts between producers and industrialists – Gross border Green Corporate PPAs (BGCPPAs) and the setting up of steering and monitoring mechanisms for the said Joint Declaration, as provided for in the Brussels Declaration signed in December 2018 by the five countries.