Africa

Bidding for pre-qualification to the tender is open to developers until August 19. The projects are being developed in the frame of the Millennium Challenge Account-Bénin II (MCA-Benin II) program.

The IFC and the country’s power utility are planning to build small on-grid solar parks across three to five different sites, and are seeking a project consultant.

The African Development Bank is providing around $56 million to fund a program to bring electricity to around 900,000 households in sub-Saharan Africa by 2025. The financial institution will also provide African distributed energy service companies with critical technical guidance and credit enhancement.

After several year of stalled and failed projects, Zimbabwe’s government is now seeking to implement existing projects, and to get rid of licensed projects that have never been realized. The first attempt will be pushing forward the 100 MW Gwanda solar project, which had been awarded to Intratek in 2015. The government is further planning to grant incentives to rooftop PV under net metering.

According to new statistics released by African Energy Live Data, solar represents more than half of total new power generation capacity for the first three months of this year.

The government of the African country has signed a memorandum of understanding with the International Finance Corporation for the development and construction of several solar parks. The projects are expected to be finalized over the next two years.

Through this procurement exercise, the Tunisian government hopes to build six solar plants with a capacity of 10 MW each and ten 1 MW small solar parks.

The Malagasy government has announced three PV projects, each with a 5 MW generation capacity, will be built this year. The nation’s cumulative installed solar capacity was only 33 MW at the end of last year.

At the 21st AEF, held last week in Lisbon. pv magazine had two journalists on the ground and here reports on five key findings.

Four projects, planned to be located across several regions, will be developed through private-public partnerships and a development program supported by the United States.