Morocco was earlier this week dethroned as the African nation with the largest solar panel farm as West Africa’s biggest solar power plant goes on stream in Burkina Faso.
Analysts say the plant the new deal will substantially reduce existing dependence on Nigerian power supply.
The 55-hectare plant at Zagtouli on the outskirts of the capital Ouagadougou will be able to churn out 33 megawatts – enough to power tens of thousands of homes.
Presiding over the opening ceremony will be Burkinabe President Roch Marc Christian Kabore and his visiting French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, whose country partially funded construction of the facility.
“For the past six weeks the plant has been in a test phase with production of 14 MW, and will reach a peak of 33 MW during December, sufficient sunshine permitting,” said the site’s construction manager, Stephane Nosserau.
“This is west Africa’s largest plant in terms of installed capacity,” added construction overseer Saidou Nana.
The plant’s 129 600 260-watt solar panels are capable of annually pumping out 56 gigawatts – equivalent to five percent of current production – into the network of national power firm Sonabel, he said.
“We import energy from Ivory Coast and there have been difficulties obtaining supplies at times,” said Nana.
“That is why we decided with financial backers to provide Sonabel with a source of energy from photovoltaic panels to respond to the public’s needs, which are growing at an annualised 13%,” he explained.
The added power will help reduce power shortages, said Nana, which greatly hamper the economy.
Burkina Faso produces only about 60% of the electricity it consumes – and just 20% of the overall population is hooked up to the grid. Many people use wood or butane gas bottles.
The 47.5m-euro cost of the plant has been funded via 25m in donations from the European Union and a loan of 22.5m from France’s development agency.
Cegelec, part of the French firm Vinci Energies, built the facility, designed to be a pilot scheme.
“With the financing terms that we have, the price per kilowatt-hour is considerably cheaper than for thermal production, which will allow us to reduce operating costs within Sonabel,” Nana said.
Energy produced by the Zagtouli plant will cost some 45 CFA francs (seven euro cents) per kilowatt-hour.
That is around a third of the 145 CFA francs per kilowatt-hour it costs to produce electricity at fossil-fuel plants, according Sonabel’s operations manager, Daniel Serme.
The world’s biggest solar plant is a 648-MW facility in Kamuthi, in India’s Tamil Nadu state. A 40-MW solar plant on a lake over a collapsed coal mine in Huainan, China, is the largest floating solar-powered generator globally.
