UGANDA’S 9TH POSITION IN GLOBAL RANKINGS FOR GREEN ENERGY POTENTIAL BOLSTERED BY NEW SOLAR POWER PLANT
(Posted 22nd March 2016)
An impressive list of names, supporters and financiers appeared on the main board at the venue of the ground-breaking of what will be Uganda’s first and East Africa’s largest solar powered electricity plant.
Dubai based Access together with EREN partnered with the Ugandan government to construct over the next three months a 10 MW power plant, ready to feed much needed electricity into the national grid, supporting as many as 40.000 households in North Eastern Uganda.
KFW, the German Development Bank, came on board as key financiers and the European Union gave a major grant for the project to get it off the ground.
The new plant can eventually be expanded to as much as 30 MW of electricity generation, all of course 100 percent renewable energy taken from the power of the sun.
The town of Soroti was chosen for several reasons, vicinity of a major electricity substation, one of the highest ratios of sunshine days in the entire Republic of Uganda and availability of land for the construction and future expansion of the plant.
The new facility, when ready, will increase Uganda’s green footprint and underscore a recently published study result that the Pearl of Africa is ranked ninth among 55 countries sampled for the potential to generate power from renewable sources.
(A Teso tribesman celebrating the ground breaking of East Africa’s largest solar powered electricity plant in Soroti)
The local political and administrative leadership was, little wonder there, in a buoyant mood that day when the Head of the EU Delegation to Uganda together with the Dutch Ambassador and representatives of the companies involved turned up in Soroti to break ground and launch the estimated four months construction period.
