“African Utility of the Future” competition
AfDB and EnergyNet, organisers of the AEF, have created the ‘African Utility of Future’ competition enabling teams to compete for a $5,000 prize.
Image source: Renewable Energy World
UK, London: The African Development Bank (AfDB) and EnergyNet, organisers of the Africa Energy Forum (AEF), have created the ‘African Utility of Future’ competition enabling teams to compete for a $5,000 prize.
The competition seeks to inspire team-building and innovative ideas to transform current utilities into advanced, futuristic, smart, sustainable and agile African power utilities. The overarching principle is to create a platform for current asset-owners to come up with innovative, realistic, practical and implementable ideas for “leap-frogging” existing utilities in the future. The design will be grounded around the five pillars of the Sustainable Utility Transformation agenda: improved sector governance, least-cost integrated resource planning, human capital development, sector reforms and financial sustainability, as well as smart partnership and performance monitoring.
The competition opened 8 October with a submission deadline of 6 November 2020. Team entries will remain anonymous, and the use of team names are encouraged. As the objective is to solicit realistic and practical ideas relevant to African utilities currently operating, only submissions from teams representing current distribution asset owners will be allowed. These distribution asset owners can be public or private sector, and on-, off- or mini-grid based.
Finalists will be announced on 11 November, with the winning team announced on 13 November – the closing date of AEF 2020.
Source: Renewable Energy World