Listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM), Kibo Energy confirmed it has acquired the Victoria Falls Solar Park project for £10 million.
It acquired the project from Broomfield International Ltd in a statement Monday. Said Kibo CEO Louis Coetzee:
We are pleased to have been in a favourable position to participate in this Transaction, which is timely, following the Company’s strategy to disinvest from fossil fuels and focus on renewable and clean energy projects.
Drawing from our investments into the reserve power market, development of waste-to-energy projects in Southern Africa and the UK, as well as strategic partnerships with key long duration energy storage players, we are positioning the company for growth.
This places Kibo at the heart of a very bright and renewable future for energy. He further explained that the near-production renewable energy assets all have a time horizon of fewer than 18 months to the first production.
The project was primarily conceived for self-consumption and, in particular, to supply power to the company’s data centre and a commuter rail electrification project.
However, developers did not rule out selling some of the generated power.
According to Kibo, the project rollout is being implemented in phases of 25MW, starting with 5 MW being connected to the grid in April 2022 and 20 MW before December 2022.
This is happening when the demand and need for fully renewable power in Zimbabwe are now recognised as a national priority and backed up by Zimbabwean government policy directed at infrastructure investment.
Zimbabwe experienced a huge shortfall of electricity in the past two years, as well as being unable to import enough from regional power utilities due to huge debts that need to be cleared first.