Which of Tanzania’s six wind and solar sites will private producers build first?

TANESCO’s first wind and solar public-private partnerships will be chosen from six candidate projects totalling 500MW, under an advisory mandate tendered through the World Bank. The country’s largest grid-connected solar plant, at Kishapu, has been on the grid since March, and its 100MW second phase was contracted in July.

Half of the 500MW lined up for Tanzania’s wind and solar pilots is solar, with 100MW plants proposed at Manyoni and Nzega, according to the World Bank procurement notice for transaction advice on the projects, which closed to bidders on 28 April. Isimani, the smallest of the solar candidates at 50MW, brings the solar share to 250MW and matches the wind capacity on the same list.

Wind makes up the other 250MW on the list, led by two 100MW candidates at Makambako and Kateshi. Kishapu, where the country’s largest grid-connected solar plant already runs, is down for a further 50MW of wind.

At least one solar and one wind project will be chosen from the six as pilots, and the adviser’s brief is to take them to a bankable business case with draft transaction documents ready for procurement. Upstream advice on risk allocation and on the strategy for the tenders themselves sits in the same mandate.

Kishapu’s solar plant in Shinyanga connected its first 50MW to the national grid in March, after a TZS118.6bn first phase funded by the government with the French Development Agency (AFD), and the contract for a 100MW second phase was signed on 27 July. Sagemcom Energy & Telecom of France and STEG International Services of Tunisia are building it over 17 months on an AFD concessional loan, at TZS204.4bn, which brings the cost of the full 150MW to about TZS323bn, according to TANESCO’s managing director, Lazaro Twange.

Measured against the 2,115MW Julius Nyerere hydropower plant on the Rufiji, Tanzania’s largest power station, the six candidates together come to just under a quarter of its capacity, and Kishapu’s full 150MW to about 7%. African Energy reported in May that a senior official had set out plans to procure large-scale renewable capacity for Tanzania “with a renewed appetite for private investment”, in a programme the publication said would be “augmented by new international interconnector capacity”.

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