Project description
A renewable solution to energy poverty in Africa
Across Africa, more than 900 million people lack access to clean cooking facilities. This deficiency contributes to over one million deaths annually, primarily among women and children, due to the use of firewood and kerosene. Additionally, the relentless search for fuelwood also encroaches upon protected wildlife areas, exacerbating deforestation and biodiversity loss. In this context, the EU-funded AfricaEnergyParks project will apply the water-energy-food-ecosystem approach. Specifically, it will deploy solar PV, battery storage, and biomass for a plug-and-play microgrid. Enhanced with productive energy use technologies, such as improved cookstoves, it aims to mitigate deforestation caused by fuel gathering. The project will assess its social, economic, and environmental impacts, aiming for widespread adoption across Africa.
Objective
We will establish a Renewable Energy Park (REEP) in a rural community fringing the Mole National Park in Ghana to demonstrate energy access and climate resilience using the water-energy-food-ecosystem (WEFE) nexus approach. We will replicate a plug-and-play microgrid developed under the ongoing Horizon project “RePower”, using solar photovoltaics (PV), battery energy storage system (BESS) and biomass combined heat and power (BCHP). To increase energy demand of the community, we will develop technologies and activities for the productive use of energy (PUE) using a circular economy approach, whereby waste generated from agriculture and food processing serves as feedstock for the BCHP plant and cookstoves.
An estimated 900 million Africans have no access to clean cooking and over one million deaths occur annually from use of firewood and kerosene involving mainly women and children. We will test and promote the use of improved cookstoves (ICS) that can be easily integrated into the current traditional cooking system. This will help to arrest intrusion into the protected wildlife park for fuelwood which has led to widespread deforestation and loss of biodiversity.
We will use life cycle approaches to measure the social, ecoconomic and environmental impacts of the project and cooperate with other LEAP-RE and CCSE projects to facilitate the adoption of the results across Africa. We will identify and catalogue sources of funding including public and private investors and international private and donor funding. Attention will also be given to building local value chains for materials supplies and a skilled workforce for the operation and maintenance of the microgrid and PUE components.
The REEP will be fully operational by the end of the project period and is expected to become financially self-sustainable within 5 years. Our business model will be based on a public-private partnership and include other sources of financing such as sale of carbon credits.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsliquid fuels
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementemployment
- agricultural sciencesagricultural biotechnologybiomass
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energysolar energyphotovoltaic
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-IA - HORIZON Innovation ActionsCoordinator
8000 Aarhus C
Denmark