(Business in Cameroon) - The Cameroonian Minister of Energy, Basile Atangana Kouna, managers of the French company Générale du solaire and of the investment fund Arborescence Capita, signed on 6 January 2016 in Yaoundé, an agreement on the financing, construction and operation of solar power plants in the Adamaoua, Northern, Extreme-North, Central and South-West regions, for 300 MW globally.

The first solar power plant in this investment plan will be built in the Adamaoua region, in northern Cameroon, an area of the country where the solar exposure level is the highest (5.8 kWh/m2/day, as against only 4 kWh/m2/day in the south of the country, according to the regulatory authority of the energy sector). With a production capacity of 20 MW, this energy infrastructure will cost FCfa 18 billion and generate 50 direct jobs.

The expected infrastructure “will be used to produce 32 GWh of electricity per year without any CO2 emission, corresponding to the consumption of more than 100,000 Cameroonian households. Its production will be absolutely complementary to that of the Lagdo dam, which currently supplies most of the electricity in the region. The solar production peak indeed coincides exactly with the period of low availability of the hydroelectric resource”, we learned in an official communiqué.

As a reminder, this project, the very first of this scale in the country in terms of solar power, is one of the concrete effects of the Ema Invest Forum, whose 9^th edition was organised in Geneva, Switzerland during October 2013. Cameroon was the guest of honour.

Brice R. Mbodiam

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