The Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) company’s Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund (EAIF), which is managed by Ninety One, has announced a €25m (R450m) financing facility for a flagship hydropower plant in Ivory Coast.
The facility will go to Ivoire Hydro Energy (IHE), which is building a 44MW hydro-electric plant on the Bandama River near the village of Singrobo in the West African country. The long-term financing package will enable IHE to achieve financial close on the Singrobo project to complete the design, construction and operation of the plant, and boost rural access to clean energy.
The Singrobo plant will reduce the need for expensive peak-time, diesel-generated power production and cut CO² emissions by about 124,000 tonnes a year.
Electrification rates range from 88% in Ivory Coast’s urban areas to as low as 31% in rural regions. The government wants to increase the country’s total installed power generation capacity to 4.2GW from approximately 2.2GW by 2030, mainly through public-private partnerships.
“The new facility at Singrobo will be Cote d’Ivoire’s first hydro-electric development by an independent power producer,” said Paromita Chatterjee, investment director at Ninety One, the fund manager for EAIF. “It delivers on three of PIDG’s strategic objectives: mobilising private capital, enabling economic development and contributing to increasing Africa’s stock of renewable energy infrastructure.”
The Singrobo plant, which has a total construction cost of €174m and will provide 217 gigawatt hours (GWh) of capacity a year, is located on the Bandama River, 23km downstream from the Taabo Dam and about 148km by road from the capital, Abidjan.
Construction of the plant — along with 3km of access roads and a 4km 90kV transmission line and substation infrastructure to connect it to the Taabo-Agboville transmission line — will create more than 500 jobs. A long-term power purchase agreement will see all the energy produced sold to Compagnie Ivoirienne d’Electricité, which operates the national power grid.
The African Development Bank (AfDB) acted as the mandated lead arranger of the debt finance and will be a senior lender to the project in its own right. The other lenders are the German international development agency DEG and the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC).
A further 25% of the Singrobo plant’s cost is funded by equity from the project’s shareholders: IHE Holding; the Africa Finance Corporation; and DIPFA, a Denham Capital-owned international investment platform focused on power projects. Neo Themis SARL is advising and acting for the shareholders regarding the project’s development and financing agreements.
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