Togo has opened West Africa’s largest solar power plant as part of an effort to expand access to electricity and promote renewable energy in the small coastal nation.
The 50 megawatt plant in central Togo would power over 158,000 homes and reduce more than one million tonnes of CO2 emissions, Togo’s President Faure Gnassingbe announced late Tuesday on Twitter.
“This project is the fruit of our ambition to bring universal access to electricity and provide clean and renewable energy to all.”
“I am thrilled it was done in record time” (18 months), he added.
Togo has now surpassed Burkina Faso who was home to West Africa’s biggest solar farm in 2017 with a 33-megawatt plant located in the town of Zatubi, outside the capital Ouagadougou.
AMEA Togo Solar, a subsidiary of Dubai-based AMEA Power, constructed the project at Blitta, 267 kilometers (165 miles) north of the capital Lome.
It is equipped with 127,344 solar panels that are anticipated to generate 90.255 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy per year.
The project, which is named after Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, got funds worth more than 35 billion CFA francs ($63.7 million) from the West African Development Bank and the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development.
An additional 20 MW of capacity is planned to be added to the facility by the end of the year.
AMEA Togo Solar will have 25 years to operate the facility.
Togo, which imports over half of its energy from Nigeria and Ghana, is relying on solar energy to expand electrical availability to its eight million people.
