Germany has provided a €156 million low-interest loan to Bangladesh to help drive renewable energy and energy efficiency investment.
Monowar Ahmed, secretary of Bangladesh’s Economic Relations Division (ERD) and German ambassador to Dhaka Peter Fahrenholtz signed off the deal in Dhaka yesterday.
A senior ERD official told pv magazine the money will be used to provide low-cost financing for renewable power generation projects including solar plants.
The funding has been provided for a 36-year term at 0.75% interest and is part of more than €3 billion worth of financial and technical support supplied to Bangladesh by Germany since 1972. Fahrenholtz said nature conservation, climate change adaptation, water management and mangrove management in the Sundarbans are other issues being addressed by Germany’s continued development assistance to the south Asian nation.
The Bangladeshi government is also tapping other sources to provide low-cost finance to help the deployment of renewable capacity in a nation which already generates 601 MW of clean energy and wants 10% of its electricity to come from clean sources by next year.
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Railway rooftop solar
Meanwhile, Bangladesh Railway will set up solar plants at stations, office buildings, junctions, workshops and staff quarters nationwide. Officials expect the installations to supply 100 MW of solar rooftop generation capacity.
Private sector developers are set to install the arrays on around 10 million square feet of Bangladesh Railway rooftops, using low-cost funding provided by the government through the Infrastructure Development Company Limited.
Officials from the Power Division have said German state-owned development bank KfW has expressed interest in extending technical and financial support for a feasibility study on the railway rooftop project.
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