BUSINESS REPORTER
Distributed Power Africa (DPA), a business of Cassava Technologies, has signed a 25-year power lease agreement with Varun Beverages to install a 2.5MWp rooftop solar solution at the company’s manufacturing plant in Harare.
With a projected annual energy production of 4.1GW, the system will be mounted at Varun Beverages’ Simon Mazorodze bottling plant in Harare and will be the largest roof-mounted solar system installed in Zimbabwe to date, and one of the largest in the Southern African region.
Varun Beverages, the licensed bottler for PepsiCo products in Zimbabwe, will benefit from significant savings on the costs of grid and diesel backup power, business continuity during power outages and a reduced carbon footprint.
Vijay Bahl, Varun Beverages Zimbabwe CEO, said described the solar plan as a “milestone project”.
“Implementating this solar-powered solution will effectively reduce our energy costs, enable us to manange consistent power supply and further pass the benefit of affordable Pepsi Products to Zimbabwe consumers. We are expecting a saving of approximately 2,500 tons of carbon emissions annually.”
DPA Zimbabwe CEO Divyajeet Mahajan said: “We are committed to helping our commercial and industrial customers by providing fully integrated solutions that drive down their energy costs and meet their commitments to protect the environment. We believe this should inspire other energy-intensive sectors to join the growing movement towards sustainable energy and shift to more efficient and environmentally friendly power solutions like solar.”
With the system that DPA is installing at Varun, the beverages company can efficiently run its operations and feed excess power back to the national grid while saving over 25,000 trees annually.
DPA is a leading supplier of distributed renewable energy solutions in Africa.