WHY ISN'T UGANDA MORE INVESTED IN SOLAR POWER?

Recently a solar power plant was launched at the Kololo Indpendence grounds in a low key event that the afternoon down pour did not dampen.

The 516 kw plant, basically solar panels on the pavilion and a room full of batteries, will be used to power the National Identification & Registration Authority (NIRA) offices and data banks on the premises. But only 200 kw of it will be consumed by NIRA with the remaining 300kw to be sold to the national grid.

According to industry estimates 516kw can power about 500 Ugandan households during peak periods.

Baroness Verma, the chairperson of UK based company Nexus Green who installed the plant, said the monthly savings will amount to the total power bill of $9000 or about sh30m and this is without factoring in the potential revenue to army of selling excess capacity to the grid she said.

During the occasion defence minister Adolf Mwesige said the Kololo installation was pilot project and that his ministry intended to roll out similar plants to all military installations around the country.

A relief he said, because as it is the army consumes sh19.7b in power a year but only budgets sh7.4b for that expenditure, a deficit that keeps getting rolled over year after year.

"With costs of solar power technology falling every year – the cost of a solar cell has fallen to $0.26 per watt in 2016 from $76.67, a visitor to Uganda, which enjoys sunshine year around would wonder why power especially for domestic use is a challenge at all...

In rural areas the uptake of solar power is growing. The major cost element of solar power is the installation costs. In many cases in order to make it affordable for rural households, traders in these systems request a relatively small upfront sum and recover the rest over a period.

A combination of the falling costs of the technology and the overwhelming demand means the private sector is way ahead of the public agencies in powering up country homes.

The challenge though is that the batteries needed as part of solar systems have not seen prices drop as fast as the cost of solar panels.

It makes sense to shift as many domestic consumers to solar power and release the power generated by our hydropower dams to industry. In fact with adjustments to the law individual households can even become suppliers to the national grid like happens in Germany and other European countries which encourage solar power generation.

If this were to happen it would even mitigate against one of the disadvantages of power plants that the occupy too much space in relation to the power they generate. It is estimated that it would take two acres or two soccer pitches to generate a megawatt of power.
But if we all planted solar panels on our roofs and generated enough power for our individual households it would save us the land needed to establish a solar farms. We currently generate 50 megawatts of power by four solar farms around the country.

It reminds me of the massive savings we made barley a decade ago by shifting to energy saving bulbs. In a New Vision story from the September 2007 it was reported that 30 MW were saved during peak periods by replacing 750,000 normal bulbs with energy saving bulbs.

While the urgency to save power may not be there now – when the 600 MW due from Karuma comes on line later in the year we will have a surplus capacity of about 1000 MW, we need to be making hay while the sun shines.

Which brings us back to Nexus Green. The company has an understanding with government that it will set up a plant in Kapeka to assemble solar systems for irrigation. It is not inconceivable that if it takes off and its prices are pocket friendly they may very well end up expanding their market to domestic users.

Solar power is an opportunity That has gone begging for far to long.

To illustrate world Solar power generation currently stands at about 500 Gigawatts and of the eight major generators only Australia and India are in the tropics.