ABDELMOUMEN PUMPED STORAGE HYDROELECTRIC PLANT (PSHP)

The project

The Abdelmoumen PSP, 70 km from Agadir, is part of Morocco’s plan to expand and integrate renewable energies. The power plant works like a battery:

• When there is surplus energy in the system, it used it to pump water from the lower to the upper reservoir;
• When the system needs energy, it releases the water from the upper reservoir through the turbines, which generate electricity.

This PSP project included the earthworks to build 18 km of road and the two reservoirs, excavation, and building the partly underground power plant and a 3 km waterway (including 1 km underground).

The solution

A PSP is high-efficiency energy storage system: it uses water to store power and gravity to turn it into electricity by transferring it from the upper to the lower reservoir.

The challenges

This outsized project offered a host of technical challenges. Equipping and connecting the reservoirs, for instance, involved installing specific monitoring equipment including accelerometers, flowmeters and industrial-grade cells.

Transporting the earthmoving machinery to the Anti-Atlas mountain range then servicing it there – we handled the earthworks ourselves using our own equipment on this project – was another challenge.

Human resources

The training we provided helped to identify local talent and leadership skills, and to ready the crews in a short period of time. We hired 80 local earthmoving operators, mostly from nearby villages.