The consortium has made progress towards establishing a European knowledge base on microgrid installations in Africa and increasing its understanding of the local stakeholders’ acceptance of this technology, and it has developed tools and processes to evaluate the local stakeholders’ adoption of the technologies developed in RePower. The consortium established a cluster called ‘WEFE Cluster’, which was formed of Horizon Europe–funded projects focusing on technology development for Africa. So far, the participating projects are RePower, AfricaEnergyParks, SUNNY, AGRI-COOL, Swarm-E, LoCel_H2, REFFECT AFRICA, and OPTIMG. The cluster's scope is to identify common events where the projects could participate and develop joint webinars or other dissemination activities. In addition, the cluster has also identified thematic areas of interest across the eight projects, such as renewable energy systems and microgrids, circular economy and productive use of energy, sustainable cooking and cooling, gender and social inclusions, and others. We are working with key technical experts in these areas in each of the eight projects to start a series of technical meetings and share lessons learned across these projects and thematic areas. These are preliminary steps towards developing a knowledge base that can be disseminated later.
The consortium made progress on performing a load analysis for the data available until now to evaluate the optimal size of the microgrid for each of the locations in Madagascar, Niger, Senegal and Ghana. In addition, we provided a detailed description of the microgrid components, such as Solartainer, the hybrid inverter, the energy storage, the water purification system and the biomass unit, and their interconnection requirements and drafted a test plan to be performed in the 2nd reporting period to evaluate the performance and reliability of each of these components and provide data for the modelling and optimization tasks.
The production of Solartainers for Denmark and Madagascar is currently in progress, with the internal structural construction successfully completed, a layout of the microgrid installation, the installation instructions, and the procurement and logistics activities submitted.
The consortium established an Advisory Board composed of representatives from the World Bank, Sustainable Energy for All, the Africa Microbusiness Development Agency, the Energy Alliance, and the African Forum for Utility Regulators.
The consortium has partially evaluated community acceptance of the RePower technology and its participation by supplying biomass feedstock through stakeholder analysis and community engagement strategies. Key personnel and local affiliates have already started training in a series of workshops designed to better understand the simulation platform and optimization procedures. The scope of these training sessions is to enable the local teams to take over the design and optimization tasks and design future microgrid installations without project partners' support.
