Have you ever envisaged a floating city of solar panels on a lake? Well, it appears some investors in Zimbabwe have started putting the plan for a Floating Solar City into motion in collaboration with Chinese investors.
Floating Solar City
The southern Africa country wants to build a mammoth multibillion floating solar farm on the man-made Lake Kariba in order to solve its dire electricity blackouts problem and export the extra power that will be produced.
Zimbabwe has until recently been experiencing blackouts that have lasted up to 19 hours on some days and this has affected not just industrial producers but homes and other sectors too.
Now the Intensive Energy User Group in the country wants to build a one gigawatt capacity energy infrastructure consisting of 1.8 million photovoltaic panels installed on 146 modular units on Lake Kariba.
“It is envisaged that the generated electricity will be fed directly into the national grid for consumption by the IEUG, and/or sold to other suitable offtakers including trading on the Southern African Power Pool,” the Kariba Floating Solar Power Station Development Co. said in its report.
Among the players in this project are the China Energy Engineering Group, Africa Finance Corp, Africa50 and Zimbabwe Power Co..
Th promoters of the project and the Kariba Floating Solar Power Station Development Co. will seek mpre funding from other private energy equity groups to meet the financial cost of the multibillion project.
The IEUG intends to raise over $250 million for the renewable energy project from funders, but will still retain 52% shareholding once completed.
Funders including development banks will have a 38% stake while the remaining 10% will be held by the Zimbabwe government sovereign wealth fund.
A different report by Bloomberg indicated that the total cost of the project will be $1 billion, according to estimates by the China Engineering Group and IEUG. Civil engineering works will cost $186 million while installation of the panels will cost $801 million.
