Renew World Energy sets up inverters factory
Local inverter manufacturing company, Renew World Energy Limited, is set to play a lead role in the country’s quest to move into renewables to meet the growing energy demands.
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The company, which has constructed a factory to be officially opened soon, will be the only manufacturer of inverters and other balance of system products to support the solar energy industry, especially in Ghana.
It believes that expanding the renewable energy frontier is the best way to go as a nation.
In an interview, a co-founder of the company, Mr David Adomako, said hydro and thermal sources were fast losing their position as main sources of power generation, hence a huge opportunity for renewable investments, something the company has taken advantage of.
“Presently in Ghana, there is no manufacturer of inverters. My partner and I decided to enter this sector mainly on the understanding that for any economy to grow, it needs a baseload power source that will fuel industrialisation.”
He explained that a look at the renewable energy manufacturing space currently showed that there were no local inverter manufacturers. However, there were about four different manufacturers who are manufacturing PVs, which are the solar photovoltaic panels.
The panels, he said, could not work alone in providing alternating current form of power and this therefore meant that currently the country was importing solar inverters and other balance of system products to be able to support the manufacturers.
“We identified that as an investment gap and we decided to fill that gap by locally manufacturing solar inverters that will meet the demand of the local manufacturers and also in the sub-region, because there is no inverter manufacturer there as well,” he said.
Ghana, a hub of renewable energy
Mr Adomako explained that Ghana, fortunately, was well positioned geographically to be able to take advantage of every available form of renewable energy, predominantly solar and wind.
He said the manufacturing of inverters was, therefore, the right starting point as it formed at least 20 per cent of a complete renewable energy system that requires alternative current (AC).
“For us, looking at Ghana as a case study, with a population of approximately 25.8 million people, growing annually at an average rate of two per cent and has a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of average five per cent; this directly relates to the demand for affordable and reliable energy,” he explained.
He said the demand for energy was growing annually at about 10 per cent and the company believed that it would continuously grow in the next 10 years.
“We are looking at annual deficit of 200 megawatts (MW) every year for the next 10 years and that created the investment opportunity for us. And that is why we have set up an inverter manufacturing plant in Ghana,” he added.
Investments
The Renew World’s inverter factory is currently set up in Tema with production lines doing between small and medium range of inverters. In terms of system size, the factory is doing something in the region of 0.1 kilowatts to 25 kilowatts.
Mr Adomako said the company would in the next 18 months expand the factory to be able to support the megawatt invertor size for utility scale solar farm invertors.
Currently, he said, the factory was undertaking a test run of its equipment, trial production and evaluating the prototype that would eventually be put on the market.
“We are not putting products out yet on the market. We are testing to make sure that we meet all the standards including the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) specification and other international standards,” he said.
He said the company would officially launch in two months, and then their first batch of production would be out.
The product will be sent to specific institutions to appraise ourselves on performance. We want to fully sell to the market in about five months from now, when we have gotten proper feedback from industry and when we have been able to refine certain aspects of our engineering,” he added.