Distributed Power Africa (DPA) has completed the roll-out of over 500 Tesla lithium ion batteries to power commercial offices and telecom towers in Zimbabwe, Zambia and South Africa.
According to the company, commercial activity has picked up after recent lockdowns across the region, increasing demand for power among companies looking to pick up production in a region that still faces power outages.
In July last year, Econet Wireless warned that it would have to take “drastic measures” to deal with the worsening power crisis, which at the time were lasting up to 18 hours a day. Earlier this year, Zimbabwe’s telecoms companies warned that service quality would suffer due to power outages.
The use of DPA’s Tesla batteries at Econet sites has cut reliance on diesel-run generators by 80-85%.
Companies are now looking to solar storage to help them cut diesel use. Tesla batteries, according to DPA, give telecoms operators up to 50% backup, allowing them to sale of rising operational costs.
For the South African market, DPA’s storage products come when that country power utility, Eskom, has announced Stage 2 load-shedding, with blackouts of up to four hours a day.
According to Norman Moyo, CEO of DPA Africa: “We received tremendous interest from commercial and industrial customers including banks, manufacturers and data centres for hybrid solutions with storage, and we remain focussed on providing solar power with Lithium Ion battery technology to power up businesses efficiently.”
DPA recently announced that it had secured 120MW of renewable power projects in Zimbabwe, with projects of over 30MW already deployed.
Now the fastest growing solar energy solutions provider in Africa, the company has recently moved into Zambia and DRC to service customers in commercial businesses like data centres, banks, malls and mines. In the last year DPA has deployed several large projects including Liquid Telecom Midrand, Schweppes Harare, Surrey Meats, Total, UNESCO, Aga Khan Kuze and Ecobank.
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