CAIRO, May 6 (Aswat Masriya) - Egypt's Electricity Minister Mohamed Shaker said on Wednesday that Egypt will not witness a "power cut crisis" similar to the one it had witnessed last summer.

Shaker said, during the launch of a power plant in Suez's Ain Sokhna, that the state has recently established new power plants costing 20 billion Egyptian pounds.

The minister referred to an agreement the state signed with German industrial giant Siemens during an economic conference in Sharm el-Sheikh last March to introduce 13,200 megawatts to power plants.

Shaker added that the state is planning on reducing its dependency on natural gas at power plants, replacing it with coal.

Egypt has been facing an energy crisis for years, with power outages surging in the summer. The peak was during last summer, when power cuts were the most frequent.

Egyptian authorities have often owed the power crisis to a larger fuel crisis and have been taking measures in recent months to diversify sources of energy.

The government has turned to renewable energy such as solar and wind energy. The state has also passed legislations allowing the generation of energy from coal, despite environmental concerns.