Burkina Faso, in West Africa, has announced that it will develop a solar power plant 250 km southeast of the nation’s capital city of Ouagadougou, near the town of Pâ. The new solar energy plant will have an installed capacity of 30 MW and will sell power to Burkina Faso’s national power utility, La Société National D’électricité Du Burkina Faso (SONABEL). The Project includes string inverters and monocrystalline modules and will be connected to the grid via a 2km cable to a nearby sub-station.
For the project, The Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund (EAIF) will lend the project’s developer, Urbasolar SAS, 80 per cent of the capital needed for the construction of the park. The agency will be the sole lender to the project providing Euro 29 million of the estimated Euro 35.4 million development cost. Financial closure is expected to be announced by mid-2022.
Following a competitive tender process run by SONABEL, Urbasolar was selected as the developer. Urbasolar will build and operate the plant and construction is forecast to be completed within 18 months. Urbasolar has installed over 650 solar plants and currently operates solar plants with a capacity of 900MW.
EAIF is a public-private partnership and mobilises capital from public and private sources to lend to businesses creating, improving, or expanding infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa. EAIF has now supported 20 renewable energy projects across the region. Further, it has provided $350 million of loans to private sector developers contributing to an 825MW of renewable energy projects.