Going solar could help poor

It is hard to combine disparate efforts to create economies of scale, lowering costs. At the moment, most of the solar projects under way in Senegal are small-scale and expensive, says Seck.
 
GTZ is working with the Senegalese Agency for Rural Electrification (ASER) to provide villages with photovoltaic panels, aiming to bring electricity to 60 percent of the targeted populations within three years.

Private investors are funding a wind power project in northern Senegal, a biomass project to produce energy from the typha plant, and a programme to create hydro-electric power (HEP) on the River Senegal, according to Senegalese energy official Seck. But only one renewable energy scheme of any size exists in Senegal - an HEP station at the Manantali dam on the River Senegal, which has been supplying power to Senegal, Mali and Mauritania since 2002.

To set up more schemes of this size the government needs more cash. It has not been easy to attract private investors at anywhere near a large enough scale, according to the CNES’s Fall, because Senegal is still seen to be a risky place to invest, and the government provides little to no information for investors on risks and opportunities, he said.

GTZ coordinator Mansour Assani Dahouenon agreed. “The challenges for investors in renewable energies are the lack of a regulatory framework, and of incentives to investors,” he said.

Investing directly in Senelec’s renewable schemes is an “unattractive” prospect, according to Seck, because of its large debt burdens, its poor equipment and outdated infrastructure, and heavy government involvement.

And even if the money is found, it is still difficult and expensive to store and transport solar energy, says Nuttall, and few researchers have yet found effective ways of overcoming this.

Progress

GTZ is stepping in to try to help the government draw up legislation on how to feed electricity from renewable energy projects directly into the national grid.

Legislators from across West Africa came together in Ghana in late September 2008 to urge regional leaders to form a West African Renewable Energy Community to promote renewable energy projects. They also agreed to push leaders across the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to pass stronger laws to protect investors in renewable energy schemes.

Fall suggests in the meantime the Senegalese government should form a public-private partnership agency to regulate the renewable energies market, and should agree to back up big financing projects to reassure investors. Only then, he says, will solar power be affordable on a mass scale.

Nuttall recognised a solar-powered West Africa was still a long way off, but, he said, its renewables’ market can only expand. In 2007, US$150 billion were invested in renewable energy worldwide, a 60 percent increase over the previous year, he told IRIN. “Renewable energy is happening now in West Africa… there are a lot of challenges, but the fact is, that the sector is just taking off.”

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