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Power Africa Partner, Nobel Prize Nominee Breaks Ground On Solar Power Plant In Burundi

Power Africa Partner, Nobel Prize Nominee Breaks Ground On Solar Power Plant In Burundi

Netherlands-based Gigawatt Global, a U.S.-owned renewable energy company, held a groundbreaking ceremony this week in Burundi for a 7.5-megawatt solar power plant that is expected to add 15-percent power generation capacity to the East African country.

Burundi has just a 5-percent electrification rate as of 2013 — 2 percent in rural areas, 28 percent in urban areas — according to a Power Africa fact sheet updated Aug. 9, 2016.

The groundbreaking was held Thursday in Mubuga, PV-Tech reported. The solar plant will be spread over 42 acres of land in Mubuga village, Burundi, 65 miles from the capital of Bujumbura, according to The Guardian:

Mubuga has never had electricity and is 6.8 miles away from the power grid. Its residents have depended on candles, lanterns, firewood and charcoal since time immemorial. Construction materials will spend days making the 900-mile road journey here from the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

This is the second African solar plant for Gigawatt Global, which in 2014 financed and developed a giant Rwandan solar field and helped fund an adjacent youth village for orphans, according to an earlier AFKInsider report.

The company markets itself as a solar and social development enterprise.

“Empowering economic and social development is at the heart of our green energy business,” said Michael Fichtenberg, vice president for finance and business development at Gigawatt Global, according to a Solar Server report.

The Rwandan youth village earned Gigawatt Global a 2015 Nobel Prize nomination based on its “new model of impact investing for humanitarian and environmental change,” according to The Jerusalem Post. “Gigawatt Global – the first to develop a utility-scale solar field in East Africa – uses a hybrid model to address two critical issues facing Rwanda and indeed much of Africa today: a growing number of orphans and marginalized children, as well as a lack of a sustainable energy model for the continent.”

One of the founding partners of President Barack Obama’s Power Africa initiative, Gigawatt Global plans to deploy $2 billion in renewable energy projects in Africa in the coming years, said CEO Josef Abramowitz, according to a See News Renewable report.

“We are targeting sub-Sahara Africa as a high-impact and high-growth market, with a portfolio of small, medium and large power projects in the highest priority development areas,” Abramowitz said.

The $14 million project in Burundi is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2017. After construction and grid interconnection, the plant will sell its power to Burundi’s national electric company for 25 years.

It will be the largest private international investment in Burundi’s power sector in almost 30 years.

“This high impact development investment supported by leading international financial institutions signals that Burundi is open for development and business,” Fichtenberg said.

Most of the country’s existing 34-megawatt capacity comes from domestic hydropower, with the remainder from 6 MW of installed thermal capacity. Demand in Burundi is expected to exceed 100megawatts by 2020.

Gigawatt Global built the 8.5-megawatt Rwandan solar field and launched it in February 2015 at a cost of  $23.7 million. It is expected to increase the country’s ability to generate power by 6 percent. Just 15 percent of Rwanda’s population had access to electricity.

Located on 49 acres, the Rwandan field has 28,360 photovoltaic panels and is the largest and first commercial-scale solar field in Africa outside of South Africa and Mauritius, according to TheJerusalemPost.

Gigawatt Global’s’s Israeli research and development arm, the Jerusalem-based Energiya Global, supplied the initial research and development and seed money for the Dutch developer, which took over and implemented the project.

“We are very excited at the groundbreaking of the Gigawatt Burundi solar field,” said Come Manirakiza, Burundi’s Minister of Energy and Mines. “After their success in Rwanda, Gigawatt Global has proven it can be relied on to deliver efficient, clean renewable energy at reasonable cost, contributing greatly to our economy and society.”

The Burundi project got a grant from the Energy and Environment Partnership — a Finland-U.K.-Austrian fund — and the Belgian Investment Company for Developing countries. It is also supported by the Germany-based Africa-E.U. Renewable Energy Cooperation Programme (RECP) and the U.K.-headquartered Renewable Energy Performance Platform (REPP), Gigawatt Global said.