Largest wind/solar/storage facility in Africa

View of Mt Kenya near Timau, Meru county, Kenya
Source: This is Kenya

From IEEFA:

Japanese developer Eurus Energy and Australian-headquartered wind developer Windlab have signed a deal with Kenyan authorities to develop an 80MW solar-plus-wind-plus-storage facility in central Kenya. The Meru County Energy Park is being hailed as “Africa’s first large-scale hybrid wind, solar PV and battery project.”

According to news reports in The Standard and ESI-Africa, the US$150 million plant will comprise 20 wind turbines and 40,000 solar panels. The facility will be a public-private partnership, and the Meru County government will own part of the project once it is operational. Construction is due to start in 2021.

A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between Windlab East Africa, Eurus Energy, the Kenya Investment Authority and Meru County government on Thursday 29 August at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development.

In June, a consortium of government and development financiers, including the World Bank and Dutch development institution SNV, unveiled a US$47 million pot for providers of off-grid domestic solar in rural Kenya.

I talked here about how Windlab is constructing a similar facility in Australia.  If you think about it, it's obvious that a combination of wind and solar will produce more stable output than solar alone, if only because the wind blows at night when the sun doesn't shine.  But since, even without that, wind and solar tend to be inversely correlated, the average of the two is less variable. If you add enough storage to the mix you should be able to get near baseload output.  For a developing country unfamiliar with renewables, a single plant producing output which mimics the output of a baseload power station is presumably easier to integrate into the grid.   Also, because the wind, solar and storage are all co-located, it'll be cheaper too. 

Afterthought:  Isn't that part of kenya stunning?  I want to go there!