How do you make millions from the sun in Africa? You can replace kerosene lamps in Tanzania or build a solar farm, the size of a small island, in Ghana. Everyone is talking about it and many want to invest. It involves importing millions of solar panels, installing them in barren deserts, then cashing in. Sounds easy, but it isn’t. Watch out for sand dunes, fast-growing vegetation and hungry animals.
You would think that a company that can build a solar panel designed to withstand hail stones shot from a cannon would be able to weather anything nature can throw at it. Think again.
Problems come in thick, fast and furry, according to Matthew Merfet, Africa and the Middle East’s project director at First Solar, a company that operates more than 20 utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) plants producing 1.7 gigawatts of energy worldwide.
“On one farm, we noticed a number of panels kept shutting off. We thought it was a cable problem, and we didn’t know why. It took us months to figure out that racoons had moved in and were chewing the cables,” says Merfet.
Fending off rodents on a 4,000 hectare plot is just one of the many unexpected headaches for solar energy farmers. Merfet says First Solar discovered dandelions and trees that grew so high they blocked the sunlight. In deserts, sand dunes piled up.
Finding these problems is harder than you think. Merfet’s company has to fly a toy plane with an infrared camera across fields of panels to check for dark spots.
“It’s easy to get lost out there, finding your way in acres of land is impossible, so we have GPSs,” he says.
Even when everything is working, solar energy can present problems. Merfet says solar energy is unique in that it has a predictable timeframe; you have roughly 10 hours to maximize a sunny day. The key is to heat your panels quickly, and keep them in the sunlight for as long as possible.
As the sunlight is converted to money, companies like First Solar have come up with black panelled solar units designed to follow the sun like a field of sunflowers.
It also means that if one panel breaks, only that panel will miss out on the light. Compare this to a conventional solar farm that moves panels in rows; if a motor malfunctions, the entire row will fail to soak up the rays. Even with hungry creatures and growing trees, First Solar believes this sunflower system can increase output by 25% a day.
In September, South Africa bedded down its first private PV plant in Kimberly, three months ahead of schedule. The 75-megawatt (MW) solar farm houses 312,000-panels. The country’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme has allocated $2.8 billion for renewable energy, of which 8,400MW are for solar PV. Currently, South Africa needs 41,346MW of new power over the next 17 years. The country also needs to upgrade its grid infrastructure, which is so out of date it might not be able to support all the required renewable energy.
Ghana has also stepped forward. Once their giant 450 acre, 155MW solar plant near Aiwaiso is completed in 2015, it will be the biggest solar plant in Africa, boosting electricity capacity by 6%. Costing $400 million, the project will have the capability to generate sufficient energy for 100,000 homes.
This dwarfs Africa’s former largest grid-linked solar plant, Kigali Solaire, in Rwanda. The small 250-kilowatt plant helped the county during a two-year drought, which strained its hydroelectricity plant.
Investing in Africa has only been possible after prices of PV modules dropped by 80% since 2008, according to CleanTechnica. As prices reduce, more technology arrives in Africa.
Then there are days when the sun doesn’t shine, according to South African analyst Chris Yelland of EE Publishers.
“Solar energy can produce more power than wind during the day &#8230; we generally have a sunny climate in South Africa. One of the biggest disadvantages of solar power is that the price is not coming down. There is also no storage in solar PV, which restricts power during the night. So you need batteries to store energy and they are expensive, which makes it uninteresting for investors,” says Yelland.
But, soon night won’t be a problem. Abengoa Solar, responsible for building the world’s largest solar plant, is now planning to build the largest parabolic trough solar plant in the world, in Arizona, in the United States. Solana will be the first solar plant in the United States with thermal energy storage. This plant, which will cost $2 billion, will be capable of producing energy night and day.
One of the investors taking the plunge is Adam Camenzuli. For Camenzuli solar energy is a common topic around the dinner table, but his best idea came in the stalls of a McDonald’s in Toronto, Canada.
“We were just hanging out and talking. We saw that the North American and European economies were not going to be the drivers of tomorrow’s growth. With our ties to Africa, we always talked about the next thing for the continent’s growth,” he says.
“We realized that bringing in solar lamps was not a viable business in the long-term—we had to do something different. We had to be innovative and combine the effectiveness of pay-as-you-go, which revolutionized mobile telecommunications, with the benefits of solar technology.
The current market penetration for solar energy is around 15 million people, but there are 600 million people who use kerosene. A family in Tanzania can spend 10 to 25% of their income on kerosene alone. There is a large quantity of low quality solar lanterns coming into the market [Tanzania] … But the upfront cost of a solar lantern is $20 dollars. The average person can’t afford that. Kerosene lanterns are the best alternative,” says Camenzuli.
Clad in a neat black suit and blue shirt, the Canadian-born Camenzuli is in the heart of Sandton, South Africa,.He has traveled from China to Brazil, on the hunt for investors that will back his idea.
In 2011, shortly after moving to Tanzania, his idea shone like a bulb in the dark.
“The ‘aha’ moment was when we realized we had to separate the components of the lamp and introduce a pay-as-you-go model through swapping the battery/light portion of the lamp,” he says.
Camenzuli was even able to throw in a cell phone charger, which has made the lantern even more popular. He sold it to small shops that sell cigarettes, soap and daily doses of kerosene in Tanzania. They call these shops Dukas, and for Camenzuli they are his first step to solar millions.
“By selling through Dukas, you can rent the battery, and swop out a used battery. The Dukas then charge the batteries on their roofs. People pay $20 over the course of a month to rent it, around 66 cents a day. Its money they spend on kerosene, so there is no additional cost to the user. At the end of the 30 days they have paid for the lamp and get to keep the solar panel. In effect, it’s a fully working lantern at 66 cents a day. The individual Duka keeps all the spare batteries. They pay a small charge for the battery and solar panel batteries can last for two years. The beauty is that you can replace individual pieces if it breaks,” says Camenzuli.
It took only six months to turn his dream into reality. Big or small, Africa is the ideal landscape for solar energy. Early bird entrepreneurs are snapping up the worms, but they must watch out for hungry animals.  <img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-2290" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_6883-300x277.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="277" />

Don’t Let The Dandelions Or Nibblers Dim The Sun

The invention of the automobile has gone hand-in-hand with an unfortunate counterpart: accidents. This has been, mainly, due to driver error, rather than mechanical failure, so the objective for some time has been to eliminate this factor and make the daily commute less stressful. Popular culture brought us examples of cars that were capable of driving themselves, Knight Rider’s Knight Industries Three Thousand (KITT) for example, and it seems these once fairy tale visions will soon be realized.
The development of autonomous cars—and we’ll get to why this term is specifically used, rather than “driverless” vehicles—has been built on advances in safety that really started with seemingly innocuous features such as ABS. Here, an on-board computer senses heavy braking and intervenes before the wheels lock up. It’s therefore trying to circumvent human error, which is what autonomous cars do—just on a grander scale.
Volvo introduced its City Safety feature on their XC60 range some years back, which made use of lasers that could sense an impending accident. The technology assisted drivers by applying the brakes, up to 100% if required. The goal has been to use autonomous driving technology for those tedious commutes to work and back where frustration, tiredness, traffic jams and all those other aggravating factors come into play. This led to the development of FROG (Free Ranging On Grid technology); a car with an on-board computer loaded with maps. The vehicle knows where its starting location is and it checks its progress along the way by counting wheel revolutions, and its proximity to electronic beacons.
FROG is already being used for loading cargo as well as in factories, and the intention is to use it for public transportation. In this scenario, passengers go to a stop point and press a button; essentially calling the car as one would an elevator. You’d then get on and disembark at whichever location you’d selected as you would on a bus or train. Naturally, the downfall of the system is that the vehicles only go to predetermined places.
The autonomous cars of our future will make use of a range of technologies including radar, GPS, computer vision and would necessitate that the various systems of the car communicate with each other. Like the human brain, the aim is to take sensory information, interpret it and react in an appropriate manner. Some systems even allow for their maps to be updated as a result of changes to the environment. Once the technology is widespread enough, we could imagine a scenario where cars could “talk” to one another by sending warnings, to those further behind, of forthcoming obstacles.
Numerous car manufacturers have jumped on the autonomous vehicle bandwagon, but perhaps the most innovative leader in the field is not a maker of transportation, but search engine giant Google. The company has made use of retrofitted cars—usually a Toyota Prius or Lexus RX450H—loaded with LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), rangefinders, cameras and GPS sensors. Each car’s equipment costs in the region of $150,000 and there are usually 10 vehicles on the road at any given time, testing the systems thoroughly. The current expense of such technology is certainly a deterring factor for any prospective users, as polls have already indicated.
With time prices will decrease; in the future drivers may get some form of rebate or financial assistance from insurance companies. Offsetting the initial outlay are numerous benefits such as increased safety, fewer collisions, less congestion therefore increased road capacity, higher speed limits for autonomous cars, alleviation of parking problems—cars could drop us off and find parking far away and come collect us when required—and an increase in fuel efficiency.
Engineer Sebastian Thrun, the co-inventor of Google’s Street View and a director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, started the Google autonomous car project. Extensive testing has taken place and the cars have driven on roads notorious for their choking traffic or dangerous bends, such as San Francisco’s Lombard Street.
Each car is accompanied by a driver, with an unblemished record, and a Google engineer in the passenger seat. In case of emergencies, the cars have an override system in place, which is very similar to those we find on modern cars with cruise control. Only two minor accidents have been recorded during the more than 482,000 kilometers of testing. Google claims that in both instances a person was driving, not the autonomous system and that the last instance was a bumper-bashing where the Google car got rear-ended.
The above begs consideration for two important points, firstly legislature concerning driverless cars and secondly, who is liable in the case of litigation. In all countries, the law presumes that a human adult is driving their vehicle. On March 1, 2012, the state of Nevada was the first to pass a law allowing for the operation of autonomous cars. In September, California and Florida followed suit.
Unsurprisingly, Nevada requires a person to be behind the wheel at all times to take over in emergency situations. License plates for future driverless cars in Nevada will be red and have an infinity symbol on the left-hand side. This of course limits the benefits of such vehicles as intoxicated drivers, minors or the unlicensed still couldn’t operate them.
In terms of the legal repercussions governing autonomous cars involved in accidents, some creative solutions have been put forward. One idea makes use of an example we’d never normally associate with driving: vaccines. The idea is that autonomous cars will be extremely safe but like a vaccine, where there is a tiny chance it could harm the patient, these vehicles could too. When a fatal accident occurs, according to this theory, the family would be compensated by a fund set up for this purpose.
Another school of thought is that the purchasers, not the manufacturers, of such cars take upon themselves the responsibility. This sounds reasonable until we consider that a software bug or mechanical failure could result in jail time or the driver being sued when in essence, he had no control over the situation. The more likely option is that the manufacturer would carry the blame, and costs incurred, should their product be found wanting. That’s a bitter pill to swallow as even if the percentage of defects is 1, this could still translate into extremely expensive lawsuits.
The last option is to spread the responsibility across all driverless car owners. They’d take out a special insurance package and the insurers would be responsible for determining whether the system, manufacturer or driver was at fault. This is still a complicated approach and difficult to implement but it would necessitate that car manufacturers would have to up their game which, in the long run, benefits everyone.
Jim Pisz, head of Toyota’s business strategy in North America, sums it up: “We feel that with autonomous driving, the driver should always be in control. It’s a critical element to our philosophy: autonomous does not mean driverless.”
Guess we won’t be calling KITT on our watch phone to save us from a sticky situation any time soon.

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Don’t Let The Dandelions Or Nibblers Dim The Sun

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