Zimbabwe mine solar power plant offer awarded to Voltalia

• French renewable resource company Voltalia has been granted the agreement to construct a 12MW solar power plant at Blanket Mine in Zimbabwe.

Caledonia Mining Corporation Plc, Blanket Mine's holding business, effectively increased US$ 13-million in September to fund the project which is anticipated to provide 27% of the mine's overall power demand.

Caledonia picked Voltalia to execute the engineering, procurement and also building and construction (EPC) agreement of the 12MW Solar power plant project adhering to an ask for tenders introduced in 2019. The project is anticipated to be Commissioned in the last quarter of 2021.

The Solar power plant project, according to Caledonia Mining Corporation plans, will certainly be applied in a number of stages with the first stage permitting planning after the signing of the EPC agreement with Voltalia.

Established in 2005, Voltalia is a global company in the renewable resource industry, creating energy as well as giving solutions in renewable resource manufacturing from solar, wind, hydro as well as biomass, also integrating storage space services. In Africa, the company is already active in Morocco, Tanzania, Egypt, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Burundi, and Malawi.

A preliminary layout stage for the project will cause the purchase and construction, subject to the conclusion of an EPC contract in between both firms.

According to Caledonia, the completion of the project will substantially assist boost the high quality of grid power of Blanket mine as well as reduce any kind of further damage which would certainly necessitate boosted use diesel generators, a more costly energy resource than grid power.

The clean energy project is targeted at not just to reduce the environmental impact of the Blanket mine, yet likewise to reduce the effect of load dropping caused by the obsolescence and production shortage of Zimbabwe's nationwide electricity grid.

The load shedding problem is intensified by the drought that is creating the level of the Kariba Dam, Zimbabwe's primary electricity creating framework, to decrease. With an ability of 1,319 MW, Kariba Dam supplies power to the national power grids of Zimbabwe as well as Zambia.

Caledonia increased the money for the plant from a share sales process on the New York Stock Exchange.

Caledonia's Blanket Mine is among the many miners in Zimbabwe buying alternative energy to maintain their operations running nonstop in action to uncertain power supply from the power utility ZESA.