Philippe Miquel, CEO, ENGIE Services Morocco

By demonstrating its agility in transforming its activities and developing new ways of working to adapt to the needs of its customers, ENGIE was able to create new development opportunities.

ENGIE has become a market leader in electricity production and energy services in Morocco. How would you describe the evolution of the company over these years?

ENGIE’s ambition in Morocco has been to contribute to the country’s objective of a wide affordable and sustainable energy access. With more than 1,600 employees in the country, we are present in power production in Morocco with 1,700MW of installed capacity with the Tarfaya wind farm (301MW) and the Safi thermal plant (1,386MW) as well as in the field of energy services. We service more than 200 customers on a daily basis in HVAC and fluid engineering, electrical and electromechanical engineering, electrical and telecom infrastructures, multi-technical maintenance, and energy efficiency.

2020 was a challenging year for all industries in Morocco. How has COVID-19 impacted your operations, and what key strategies have you followed to mitigate this impact?

In 2020, in the context of the spread of COVID-19, our teams remained constantly mobilized to ensure continuity of services on our customers’ premises. We implemented business continuity plans very early on, which enabled us to protect our employees while standing by our clients to help them resume their activities. These plans have been considered as an industry standard. In spite of the economic downturn, we continued to develop innovative solutions for a low-carbon future. For instance, Nexans Morocco and ENGIE signed a 15-year contract for the design, construction, servicing, and maintenance of a rooftop photovoltaic plant with an installed capacity of 2.5MW, covering nearly 22% of the plant’s annual electricity needs and preventing the emission of more than 700 tons of CO2 per year. In 2020, we also installed the first photovoltaic solar power plant for irrigation pumping in the agricultural sector in Morocco.

In terms of exports, what are your expansion plans?

Let’s take two examples of the expertise that we export outside of Morocco. The first one is with Groupement Orange Services (GOS), a subsidiary of ORANGE in Côte d’Ivoire that manages Orange’s network infrastructures. ENGIE Services Maroc supported ENGIE Services Côte d’Ivoire in the award of the multi-technical maintenance contract for the latest-generation data center that GOS opened in Abidjan in 2017. ENGIE’s experience in Morocco in the field of operating and maintaining data centers, with INWI in the telecom sector, with BMCE Bank in the banking sector, and with DXC Technology, was key to the successful award of the contract to ENGIE. Another example is the construction of three ground-mounted photovoltaic power plants coupled with power generators to supply three villages in Gabon with our client AUSAR ENERGY, a joint venture by ENGIE Africa, ENGIE Ineo Scle, and Centum Adetel. Our teams in Morocco managed the project from the design to the commissioning of the three photovoltaic power plants.

What are your key goals and priorities for the year ahead and for 2021?

For ENGIE, the crisis has taught us a great deal about our ability to adapt and develop new ways of working. We have also demonstrated our agility in the transformation of our activities to adapt to the current and future needs of our customers. This led to creating new development opportunities for the company in the context of this economic crisis. In Morocco, as in many countries impacted by COVID-19, adapting the economy and industrial capabilities to reduce dependency on imports in key sectors was critical in reducing the impact of the crisis. More generally, this objective to rethink supply sources to be as close as possible could be extremely beneficial to Morocco not only because of its proximity to Europe but also the essential role it plays as an economic driver in Africa. Finally, concerning the energy sector, there is a good chance the energy world of tomorrow will be more oriented toward a sustainable and greener energy supply, a world where renewable energy will be the norm. This is an area where, again, Morocco is leapfrogging the competition. Here, too, we are ready to support all economic actors in Morocco in their neutral-carbon strategy to a greener economy.