US firms ViZn Energy Systems and Jabil Inala will partner to offer turnkey zinc iron flow battery microgrids in Africa.
The energy storage systems will replace diesel generators at remote villages, and mining and agricultural facilities where a centralised distribution infrastructure does not exist.
The continent currently has around 600 million people with no access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency’s Africa Energy Outlook.
Ron Van Dell, CEO of ViZn Energy, said Africa represented an enormous market in terms of potential growth for supplying power.
He said: “Since much of the centralised distribution infrastructure does not exist across the continent, it is ripe for the establishment of distributed microgrids to power villages that currently don’t have electricity and also to replace diesel generators at remote mining and agricultural facilities. The non-toxic chemistry used in ViZn’s flow batteries means they can be safely deployed in these areas and without an HVAC system.”
Jabil entered the African markets earlier this year when it bought South African energy solutions provider and systems integrator Inala.
Jabil Inala currently operates in eleven sub-Saharan countries where traditional grids are either unreliable or uneconomical to develop.
Jabil Inala’s turnkey distributed energy solutions encompass generation, storage, monitoring, and analytics.
Howard Earley, Managing Director at Jabil Inala, said: “In the African market, it is critical for a microgrid to have the ability to operate in harsh environments while maintaining industrial power quality.”
Back in December 2015 ViZn entered into a deal to ramp up production of its zinc-iron redox flow batteries with Jabil Circuit to help it fulfill orders of its 80kw/160kwh Z20 battery storage system.
