DPA to develop Zimbabwe’s largest roof-mounted solar plant for Pepsi

Distributed Power Africa (DPA) has signed a 25-year power lease agreement with Varun Beverages to install a 2,5MW rooftop solar solution at the latter’s manufacturing plant in Harare.

A unit of Cassava Technologies, a leading pan-African technology group, DPA seeks to ensure that businesses and individuals have access to affordable and efficient green energy through a zero-start-up cost model.

This also comes as the world over is pushing for clean energy and Zimbabwe has vast potential for solar energy.

This will help offset the negative impacts of the erratic power supplies experienced by businesses resulting in reduced plant uptime.

With a forecasted annual energy production of 4,1GW, this system will be mounted at Varun Beverages’ Simon Mazorodze bottling plant.

This installation will be the largest roof-mounted solar system to be installed in Zimbabwe and one of the largest in the Southern African region.

Varun Beverages, the licensed bottler for PepsiCo products in Zimbabwe, will benefit from significant savings on the costs of grid and diesel backup power, business continuity during power outages, and a reduced carbon footprint.

Varun Beverages Zimbabwe chief executive officer (CEO) Mr Vijay Bahl remarked: “We are pleased to partner with DPA on this milestone project. Implementing this solar-powered solution will effectively reduce our energy costs, enable us to manage consistent power supply and further pass the benefit of affordable Pepsi Products to Zimbabwe consumers. We are expecting a saving of approximately 2,500 tons of carbon emissions annually.”

Commenting on the agreement, DPA Zimbabwe CEO Mr Divyajeet Mahajan, said the group was committed to assisting businesses reduce energy costs.

“We are committed to helping our commercial and industrial customers by providing fully integrated solutions that drive down their energy costs and meet their commitments to protect the environment.

“We believe this should inspire other energy-intensive sectors to join the growing movement towards sustainable energy and shift to more efficient and environmentally friendly power solutions like solar.”

With the system, the leading supplier of distributed renewable energy solutions in Africa, DPA is installing, Varun can efficiently supply its operations and feed excess power back into the national grid while saving over 25,000 trees annually.

Erratic utilities supplies have become a decade long challenge for local industry and cited on many fora as among the key challenges to reduced capacity utilisation.

The country has been battling to meet its electricity needs due to increased demand for power particularly from mining projects, both old and new, and also rapid industrialisation in tune with the country’s target to become an upper middle class economy by 2030.-ebusinessweely