Senegal has signed a contract with locally registered firm Africa Energy SA to build a coal-fired power plant with a capacity of at least 300 megawatts by 2017, according to a tender document and industry sources. The resource-poor country is big importer of energy and suffers from frequent blackouts.It also spends heavily to subsidise power due to high production costs.
President Macky Sall's government is seeking to cut its reliance on oil and diesel-fired power stations and wants coal to make up 25 percent of its energy mix by 2017."We signed a contract with Africa Energy, which will sell its whole production to (state utility) Senelec," Pape Tory Gaye, an official at the utility, told Reuters on Thursday.Gaye added that the production of power should start by the beginning of 2017.A consultant on the project, eGateway India Pvt., published a tender on Thursday in a Senegal paper seeking a partner for engineering, procurement and construction.The tender closes on March 30, and the plant is estimated to take 30 months to build, the document showed.
It provided no details on the cost.Senegal, one of the most stable democracies in West Africa, secured pledges worth about $7.8 billion at a donor conference that began in Paris on Monday to help kick-start a development plan, which includes energy projects.The government is also considering building an offshore liquefied natural gas import terminal and hopes to build an interconnector with neighbouring Mauritania to bring in power.
