Morocco officially launched on Friday the construction work for its Ouarzazate solar park, the starting point of an ambitious programme that should allow the kingdom to establish itself as a stronghold in terms of renewable energy production by 2020.

The thermo-solar power plant, the first phase of the solar park project in Ouarzazate, "is the largest of its kind in the world", declared the director general of the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (Masen), Mustapha Bakkoury, during the official ceremony presided over by King Mohammed VI.

Its construction comes to "reinforce the will (...) to optimise the exploitation of Morocco's natural resources, to preserve its environment" and to "sustain its development", he added, quoted by the MAP agency.

With a cost of seven billion dirhams (approximately 650 million euros), this first power plant, whose construction was entrusted to a predominantly Saudi consortium, will be operational by the end of 2015 and will have a production capacity of 160 megawatts.

A second phase, for which a call for tenders is underway, will then allow the capacity of the Ouarzazate park to be increased to 500 MW, which is the equivalent of supplying electricity to a city of one and a half million inhabitants.

By 2020, Morocco, which lacks significant hydrocarbon reserves, plans to build five solar parks in total, for an estimated production capacity of 2000 MW.

This plan, coupled with comparable development in wind power, should allow the kingdom to cover 42% of its needs thanks to renewable energies.

On its own, the cost of the solar energy development programme has been estimated at nearly nine billion dollars.

Present on Friday, Mohamed Abdullah Abunayyan, chairman of the board of directors of Acwa Power --the Saudi group that won the first call for tenders--, judged that this inaugural project constituted "further proof of the capacity of Morocco and Saudi Arabia to meet major technological challenges in the field of renewable energies".

Regarding the call for tenders for the realisation of the second phase of the Ouarzazate park, all the application files were to have been submitted by mid-April. The winner will be known "within a year, a year and a half", Mustapha Bakkoury had indicated in March to AFP.

Rabat's leading economic partner, France, has publicly marked its interest in the construction of this second phase.

Paris won a contract in wind power at the beginning of the year, with the GDF Suez group announcing that it would build and manage in Tarfaya (south-west) the largest park in Africa, in partnership with the local company Nareva Holding.

With a cost of approximately half a billion euros and a power of 300 megawatts, it is the largest project ever undertaken by GDF Suez in wind power. Its entry into service is scheduled for the end of 2014.