JOHANNESBURG, Oct 29 (Reuters) – UK-based off-grid power company BBOXX is looking to enter two new African markets in partnership with France’s EDF Group next year as it capitalises on growing interest in the sector from large energy companies, its chief executive said on Monday.
The two companies announced last week that the French power utility had taken a 50 percent stake in BBOXX’s operation in Togo, where it won a tender to bring electricity to 300,000 households without access to the national grid.
“We are actively looking to enter two more countries with EDF under the same sort of agreement during the course of 2019,” Mansoor Hamayun told Reuters in an interview. “Togo is the starting point.”
He would not name the countries – both of them new markets for BBOXX – but said one was located in West Africa and the other in Southern Africa.
Big European power utilities are increasingly exploring off-grid technology as a way of expanding their renewables footprint and growing their customer bases beyond stagnating home markets.
Some 1.2 billion people around the world have no access to a power grid, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Lighting and phone charging alone costs them about $27 billion a year.