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Private equity fund manager African Infrastructure Investment Managers (AIIM) has taken a majority stake in three solar plants being developed by mining company Harmony Gold in South Africa.

Investors in Africa’s power sector have been forced to fight aggressively for the most promising projects, as they have become frustrated with a lack of on-grid opportunities. Trends that emerge from African Energy’s industry soundings and analysis of project flow in the African Energy Live Data (Live Data) platform include investors taking advantage of technological and business innovation – as well as the availability of climate-linked finance – to move into commercial and industrial (C&I) solar.

Hotel group Mango Tree Beach has installed solar PV plants with a combined capacity of 1MWp at three of its four hotels in Zanzibar.

Namibian Stock Exchange-listed Alpha Namibia Industries Renewable Power (Anirep) has secured a contract to build and operate an 18.5MW solar plant at Kokerboom in Keetmanshoop, with Canadian mining company Dundee Precious Metals Tsumeb as the off-taker.

Ngodwana Mill’s biomass energy plant in Mpumalanga province came on stream in March, with capacity to burn up to 35 t/hr of biomass to generate steam and drive a turbine to generate electricity which is fed into the national grid, shareholder Sappi Southern Africa spokesperson Zelda Schwalbach told African Energy.

Lagos-based renewables developer Daystar Power has installed a 1.6MW rooftop solar plant for Ghandour Cosmetics in Ghana.

Crippling foreign exchange shortages have led Starsight Energy to refinance its debt to two development finance institutions through local currency funding from Chapel Hill Denham’s Nigeria Infrastructure Debt Fund.

Construction work has begun on two solar PV plants with a combined capacity of 30MW being built for cement manufacturer PPC Zimbabwe. 

The European Union-funded Electrification Finance Initiative (EDFI ElectriFI) has extended a $3.1m loan to German C&I solar power provider Redavia to enable it to expand its business in Ghana and Kenya.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) and its partners are planning to create what they call the world’s largest mini-grid market in Nigeria, using the new Leveraging Energy Access Finance (Leaf) financing model to support the Rural Electrification Agency (REA)’s Nigeria Electrification Programme (NEP).

Andritz's refurbishment of the Mwadingusha hydroelectric power (HEP) plant in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s Katanga province shows the potential for mobilising anchor mining clients to deliver wider power supply in DRC’s under-performing electricity supply industry. In this case the backers were Canada’s Ivanhoe Mines and China’s Zijin Mining Group who own Africa’s largest copper plant, the Kamoa-Kakula Copper Project joint venture in Lualaba province. 

Tronox Holdings is the latest energy-intensive company to make use of regulatory changes opening the electricity market in South Africa to more producers and consumers. The titanium dioxide producer has signed a power purchase agreement with Sola Group for 200MW of solar PV capacity.

South African state-owned Central Energy Fund has signed a non-binding term sheet to acquire a 10% stake in Renergen’s Victoria gas project for R1bn ($68m)

The amount of electricity that households and industrial customers can feed into Zimbabwe’s national grid through net metering has been increased from 100kW to 5MW, following the gazetting on 11 March of amendments to the Electricity (Net Metering) Regulations of 2018.

South African Breweries (SAB) has signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with local waste-to-energy developer Bio2Watt for its 4.8MW Cape Dairy biogas plant.