Lessons learnt from the AFRETEP for the African PV sector development

The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission JRC has developed the African Renewable Energy Technology Platform AFRETEP platform with 760+ African and European members, cooperating institutions for research. As a part of the project the JRC has provided training to nearly a hundred African academics in regional trainings on the state-of-art rural electrification technologies; these can also be followed online in web-streaming. The project has developed mapping applications and methods to support national governments and agencies to decide which energy technology options would better deliver their goals of rural electrification and made these available to the continents scientific communities in publications. The methods -developed by the JRC platform- take into account the diversity of energy resources, coupled with the existing grid, transport infrastructure, hydropower resources, the current diesel and photovoltaic costs, to map the current least-cost electricity options for rural electrification. So far, geographical datasets have been made publicly available (www.afretep.net) and several published papers and conferences have facilitated the spread of the results to the interested stakeholders. Most of these results are available on the Platform and the JRC websites.
1st Africa Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition Proceedings, AfricaPVSEC 2014