Sub-Saharan Africa

Located near Nairobi, the project consists of a 150 kW solar array, a 50 kW crossflow turbine and a 240 KWh storage facility. SolarNow director and CFO Ernst Vriesendorp told pv magazine that despite the project’s humble size, it has ‘large’ benefits.

An international research team has examined the potential use of hybrid microgrids that integrate PV and biogas for electric vehicle recharging in Karnataka, India. Their findings indicate that this combined approach offers economic and environmental benefits compared to separate biogas and PV systems.

The Mauritian government’s Central Electricity Board (CEB) is inviting consultancy firms to pitch their bids on conducting a feasibility study into developing a 30 MW floating solar PV farm at Tamarind Falls Reservoir in the archipelago’s southwest.

South Korean researchers have developed a long-term solar irradiance prediction method based on a reinforcement learning algorithm. They claim that the new model is able to forecast solar radiation for more than a year using just two weeks of solar radiation learning.

Ghana’s Ministry of Energy is now welcoming applications for the design, supply and installation of 35 minigrid and solar PV net-metering projects to be located at a range of island and lakeside communities in the west African country.

Scatec has turned on two solar-plus-storage facilities in northern Cameroon, with 30 MW of solar and 20 MW/19 MWh of energy storage.

Germany advanced its hydrogen ambitions this week with a fresh call for the International Green Hydrogen Promotion Program in Latin America, a collaborative deal with the UK government, and a tie-up between DHL and Sasol for sustainable aviation fuels based on green hydrogen (eSAF).

Researchers in Sweden investigated the complex non-linear tradeoffs between capacity expansion costs and reliability levels of off-grid PV mini-grids and found that capacity expansion based solely on cost-minimization may result in several reliability issues.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, explains that the climatology of Africa leads to very different seasonal generation patterns from what European solar producers experience. Data analysed by Solcast, via the Solcast API, shows this seasonal variance from summer to winter in 2023.

The South African authorities awarded project agreements to two wind-solar-storage hybrid projects that were selected in a 2 GW tech-neutral tender held under the Risk Mitigation Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme (RMIPPPP) in 2021.