IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, signed an agreement with Burkina Faso’s Ministry of Energy to assess how private investment in energy storage can contribute to higher levels of solar power production while enhancing grid stability and dispatch issues. This assessment will lead to the definition of a storage investment roadmap based on PPP models in Burkina Faso. It will be jointly supervised by IFC, the Ministry of Energy and the grid utility Société Nationale d’Electricité du Burkina (SONABEL).
Under this agreement, IFC will assess the economic benefits of storage to integrate solar capacities to the grid and decrease the overall generation costs, review the country’s legal and regulatory frameworks and compare private and public storage project development and financing models. IFC will also provide recommendations regarding various aspects of Public Private Partnerships in energy storage, based on a review of international best practices.
“This assessment is an important step to help successfully integrate a larger amount of solar power into the country’s energy mix, as planned by the government” said Ronke-Amoni Ogunsulire, IFC’s Country Manager for Burkina Faso, Benin, Ghana, Niger and Togo.
Burkina Faso’s power sector is characterized by a high reliance on expensive thermal capacities and imports. While the target is to achieve universal access to electricity by 2025, the country’s present electrification rate is approximately 20 percent. The Burkinabe government has launched an ambitious renewable energy strategy to valorize large available solar resources and decrease both electricity generation costs and exposure to oil price fluctuations.