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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: 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.