Morocco to speed up transition to clean energy with 600 ‘green mosques’

Morocco is aiming to speed up its journey towards clean energy through an awareness-raising initiative that will transform 600 mosques into ‘green’ buildings by March 2019. According to the plan, LED lighting, photovoltaic systems and solar thermal water heaters will be installed to create 100 ‘green mosques’ by the end of 2016.

In a partnership with the German government, Morocco is underwriting the innovative scheme, paying up to 70% of the initial investment costs.

“We want to raise awareness and mosques are important centers of social life in Morocco. They are a place where people exchange views about all kinds of issues including, hopefully, why renewables and energy efficiency might be a good idea,” said Jan-Christophe Kuntze, the project’s chief.

Morocco’s high-profile projects, which range from the largest windfarm in Africa to an enormous solar power plant in the Sahara desert that opened earlier this year, have helped establish the country as a regional climate leader.

Marrakech will also be hosting the COP22 climate summit in November to discuss preparations for implementing the Paris climate agreement.

The country’s environment minister, Hakima el-Haité, said in an interview that religion could make a powerful contribution to the clean energy debate, shortly before an Islamic declaration on climate change last year.

“It is very important for Muslim countries to come back to their traditions and remind people that we are miniscule as humans before the importance of the earth,” she said. “We need to protect it, and to save humankind in the process.”

The new green mosques project will be utilizing established technologies that can be adapted to public buildings and residential homes. By training electricians, technicians and auditors, it hopes to direct Morocco’s clean energy along the path followed by German’s Energiewende, (energy transition).

Kuntze also stressed that Germany was offering technological support, rather than financial opportunities for its own industries.

“We are not representing any German business interests at all,” he said. “The good thing about this project is that the Moroccan government came up with the idea themselves. It is something new and really innovative and it has not been tried anywhere else before, to my knowledge.”

Aside from the environmental benefits that the project offers, this initiative has also broken new ground for gender equality in Morocco. Many mourchidates (female clerics) have been involved in the project, as well as imams, and about a quarter of the participants in recent seminars have been women, Kuntze said.

Under the project’s energy service contract model, contractors will eventually be paid by the energy savings generated from the clean power systems they install. These should be substantial as the renovations should cut the mosques’ electricity usage by 40%.

The first 100 mosques to get a green makeover are mostly based in big population centers – such as Rabat, Fez, Marrakech and Casablanca – but the project will quickly move on to smaller villages and towns. With 15,000 mosques dotted around the North African country, the plan’s growth potential is clear.

The objective was to kickstart a renovations industry for sustainable companies that could employ many Moroccans in the clean energy sector, Kuntze said.