- Johannesburg based solar solutions provider, Blockpower, has completed the installation of a solar/battery/diesel generator hybrid PV system at the Jersey farm site of the Tanganda Tea Company in Zimbabwe.
- The system has a generating capacity of 1.4MW with 487kWh battery storage and 870 kW diesel generator power.
This is the latest edition of three projects installed at Tanganda Tea Company, installed by Blockpower. The first being a 1.2 MW hybrid solar PV system with 478 kWh battery storage and a 870 kW diesel generator. The second was a stand-alone 2MW solar PV system at the Ratelshoek estate.
“These systems include both monitoring and control programs. For this purpose, the Universal Power Platform (UPP) from Dhybrid is installed next to a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system,” explains the company headed by Kyle Bohnsack. In total, Blockpower has agreed with TTC to supply 4.6 MWp of solar power with 1,440 kWh of electricity storage, as well as 3 MVA of generation capacity from diesel generators.
This is one of the largest self-consumption electricity projects in the agricultural sector in Zimbabwe. Blockpower estimates that the installations will save TTC between 4,000 and 6,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions over the lifetime of the installations. Above all, the solution allows the farmer to gain autonomy from the Zimbabwean national electricity grid.
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
