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When power goes out in the rural town of Soroti in eastern Uganda, store manager Hussein Samsudin can only hope it won't go on so long it spoils his fresh goods.
Another shop owner, Richard Otekat, 37, has to pay a neighbour hourly to use his generator during blackouts as he can't afford to buy one himself, while others simply go without.
However residents of the town, surrounded by thatched huts, rivers and grasslands, hope a new solar plant, which went into operation last week, will bring an end to their electricity woes.
The $19 million (18-million euro), 33-acre solar plant—the first of its kind in East Africa—can produce 10 megawatts of power that is fed into Uganda's national power grid.
The project is crucial as Uganda seeks new ways to bring electricity to the 80 percent of its 40 million-strong population that does not have access to power.
Mud hut, solar panels.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by zafiro17 on Thursday December 22 2016, @08:29PM
The article doesn't go into the technical or policy issues that presaged the project here, but Germany gets a huge amount of credit for this, through their support of a Refit (renewable energy feed-in-tariff) that made this project financially feasible. Essentially, the government agrees to preferential purchases of renewable energy at rates that are still discounted over a long timeframe. So everyone wins. Germany supported this process in Uganda for several years, ending the program because it still failed to attract the big number of power developers that had been anticipated. That's not to say it wasn't a success. Uganda is getting way out in front of sourcing energy from renewable sources - they've got 780MW of power lined up from hydropower over the next two years, all developed with Chinese support. And watch the next three years, when nearby Ethiopia puts well over a gigawatt of hydropower online, enough to illuminate just about all of East Africa.
This isn't just development projects delivering niche solutions to the world's poor. It's African governments putting a lot of time and resources into maximizing renewable energy because the economics of it are favorable and improving.
This article might have been custom chosen for me - I used to work for a company developing power projects in Uganda. Never thought I'd see something on Soylent though - nice work Janrinok and Phoenix666.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by Hawkwind on Thursday December 22 2016, @09:24PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by zafiro17 on Friday December 23 2016, @07:27PM
Short answer in response: in over ten years working in Africa, I haven't heard Russia mentioned one single time. Turkey is active in Somalia, and China is heavily involved absolutely everywhere. But I'm not aware of any Russian interventions/projects/investments anywhere on the continent.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday December 23 2016, @01:11AM
Don't make the mistake of lumping hydro in with the 'green' sources usually cited. Hydro is stone cold rational, very profitable if the local geography supports it and has been happily turning out craploads of reliable electricity for about a century. Just look at the numbers you cite; hundreds of megawatts of clean reliable energy vs a the article we are commenting on getting giddy about ten megawatts of highly intermittent, high maintenance photo-voltaic.
The biggest problem with the solar panels in a country like Uganda is going to be replacing panels lost to theft. Think about it, they just put millions of dollars of solar panels near a village and didn't even connect it to the system. So the loss to a villager 'liberating' a panel or two to have lights, perhaps a TV and endless phone charging in their home is low and the benefit high.
And talk about a totally different lifestyle, run those numbers. A ten megawatt solar installation, that you know will be lucky to supply three averaged out over a year is said to be sufficient to power 40,000 homes, hospitals, etc. So long as refrigeration isn't widely employed, TV remains something a half dozen households share, etc. you might get by since these days all lights can be assumed to be LED. Pulling everybody to just 2nd world status is still a long way off.