Sahara Power Group, leading international energy and infrastructure conglomerate, has confirmed that it will continue its expansion plans through investment and partnerships in order to increase the power sector’s capacity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) during the Oil and Gas Council’s Assembly on Monday.
“As a foremost energy provider in sub-Saharan Africa, Sahara Power Group is committed to its target of increasing the Group’s generation capacity to 5,000MW via different energy mix,” said Kola Adesina, Group Managing Director at Sahara.
Reports from The World Economic Outlook by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show that growth in SSA is expected to rise from three percent in 2018 to 3.5 percent in 2019. Almost half of the region’s countries are set to grow at five percent or more, which would see per capita incomes rise faster than the rest of the world on average.
“Half of Africa’s population lives without access to electricity. The industrial sector is responsible for more than two-thirds of SSA’s total energy use. Average Electricity consumption is about 150kWh per capita. Coal is still the largest fuel source for generation in SSA” he continued in his presentation at the Assembly held in Paris.
Sahara Power has five power plants across the sub-Saharan African region totaling 2040 MW with likely potential to expand power generation in the West Africa Pool.
“There is growing interest in regional power pools across the continent and this could be adopted as a strategy to deal with the unevenly distributed energy resources and Africa’s energy problems,” explained Adesina adding that, “More affordable tariffs and an optimal generation capacity could be developed in the power sector through infrastructure linkages of power utilities and the regional power pools.”
