On Friday, April 16, Think Smartgrids organized a webinar during which its members Yélé Consulting, Odit-e and Orange Energie Middle East and Africa presented completed or ongoing smart grid projects in West Africa. The deployment of smart grids in the region is essential to ensure universal access to quality energy that is as carbon-free as possible.
Maxence Bocquel, Senior Manager at Yélé Consulting, a consulting firm specialized in digital transformation, presented his Smart Connected Microgrids project in Côte d’Ivoire. Based on its experience with the Nice Grid project, a smart solar district to manage peak consumption, Yélé’s ambition is to create urban microgrids based on renewable energies, which improve the quality of electricity supply, reduce losses for the local utility and generate energy savings for consumers, without generating new constraints for the central network.
Luc Richaud, Project manager at Odit-e, a startup that analyzes data to model networks, presented a smart metering project in Burkina Faso, led by a consortium of French companies headed by the Institut Smartgrids. The local utility, Sonabel, wants to use smart metering to prevent network overloads by temporarily reducing consumer power. The project has received green innovation funding from the French government and is currently being deployed. The partners are already planning an extension and several replications of the project.
Orange Energie, which is present in some twenty African countries, has been working for several years now on the development of green energy in Africa, replacing the diesel generators that used to power its Telecom Towers. Natsy Missamou, Director of Orange Energie Middle East & Africa, explained how Orange is partnering with solar panel installers to create minigrids that power both households and its telecom infrastructure.