H.E. Honourable Cyril Grant

SolarAfrica broke ground at SunCentral in June 2024 and has now closed financing on all three facilities in a 342MW first phase between Hanover and De Aar. The R1.35 billion transmission substation built alongside them is what allows a single site to sell to many buyers rather than one.

Madalitso Chimpeni has been building wind turbines in Malawi for three years. The grant he won through the Youth Energy Summit bought the generators, paid the machinists and gave him room to get it wrong. The turbines are fabricated and waiting for installation, and 120 households are the target.

CopperTech Metals has announced $1.5 billion for the Konkola expansion, on top of Vedanta's $1 billion commitment, as KCM works toward 300,000 tonnes by 2031.

Namibia, the DRC, Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia, South Africa, Mali and Burkina Faso have all banned the export of unprocessed minerals. Tunde Muritala Arisekola advises 54 African Union member states on minerals policy, and his argument is that the ban is the easy part.

NERSA registered 124 generation facilities between April and June, carrying 804MW and R20.18 billion of investment. Two wind facilities account for 568MW of that. The remaining 122 are solar and produce 236MW between them, most of them small and spread across municipal networks.

Two 150MW units have been under construction at Sinazongwe since August 2024, financed largely by Zambian pension money and contracted to ZESCO in full. Once running, Maamba Energy would supply around 18% of national generating capacity, with a 100MW solar plant alongside taking the site to 700MW.

Abubakar Shuaibu founded Astound Power after five years campaigning on energy access in Nigeria. His minigrid projects break ground before the year ends, with two state governments holding equity, and one of them built around an agricultural cluster.

ASPIRE runs from February 2026 to January 2030 on EUR 5.5 million of European Union funding, and none of it builds generation. The three outcomes are institutional capacity and regulatory frameworks, energy efficiency, and renewable access. It arrives a month before Botswana's first utility-scale solar plant secured $100 million from a commercial bank.