Sub-Saharan Africa

Pan-African developer and financier of distributed infrastructure projects, Ignite Power is providing solar solutions to many low-income rural dwellers in Rwanda through its ‘Extreme Affordability Plan’, setting the Eastern African country on course to achieve its vision of becoming an upper-middle-income economy by 2035.

The latest PV installation in West Africa by France’s Akuo features an agricultural and social component on a 5-hectare plot of land next to the project site.

A €62m Italo-French program will reduce risk for project developers and a €20m Spanish scheme will fund off-grid installations in sub-Saharan Africa.

The rise of clean energy and prosumers, net metering and greenhouse gas regulation all figure among the bogeymen as far as national electric companies are concerned.

Each unit contains 200 pre-assembled and pre-wired photovoltaic panels and can be deployed in 30 minutes.

Spanish renewable energy company Abengoa will deploy a 3.5 MW solar micro-grid at a vanadium mining site operated by Bushveld Minerals in South Africa. The storage system will be provided by Austria-based storage specialist Enerox Holdings Limited.

The $40 million projects will be the country’s first large scale solar-plus-storage project.

The second edition of the clean energy investment report produced by IRENA says the industry needs to unlock the $87 trillion being sat on by the world’s biggest investment houses – ‘greening’ the $100 trillion global bond market would help too.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is seeking proposals from independent power producers for PV plants ranging in size from 60 to 500 kW.

The project is being developed by South Africa-based peer-to-peer solar equipment leasing marketplace Sun Exchange. A 3.9 MWh storage system will be integrated to three different solar plants. The facility will power the packhouse, the cold store facilities, the pump sites and a farm owned by Zimbabwe’s Nhimbe Fresh.