PORT LOUIS – Copperbelt Energy Corp, the Zambian electricity supplier with customers including Glencore’s copper mines, may invest as much as $250-million in solar projects and transmission lines in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), CEO Owen Silavwe has said.
The amount includes two solar plants to generate 30 MW and 50 MW respectively, and the company is still determining their feasibility, he said on Tuesday in an interview on the sidelines of a conference in Le Morne, near the Mauritian capital of Port Louis. He estimates the total cost at between $80-million and $100-million.
“We’re beginning to look at infrastructure in the DRC,” Silavwe said, adding that Copperbelt Energy may support the Congolese State-owned power utility to develop new transmission lines to improve supplies to copper and cobalt mines there. “We are hopeful that in the next two years we will get to a stage where we implement some of these projects.”
CEC, as the company is also known, buys power from Zambia’s State-owned electricity producer and supplies it to mines in Africa’s second-biggest copper producer. The UK’s CDC Group in January offered $380-million to buy Copperbelt Energy but the conditions to the buyout are yet to be fulfilled.