Energy transition: Nearly 4,500 solar pumps planned by Aner

Faced with soaring energy costs and post-harvest losses, Senegal is banking on solar energy. In its strategic plan, the National Agency for Renewable Energy (Aner) plans the deployment of multifunctional platforms and thousands of photovoltaic pumps to support rural activities.

Long handicapped by the absence or high cost of electricity, rural communities today find in solar radiation the essential lever they lacked to sustainably transform their daily lives. This large-scale dynamic aims above all at direct and autonomous access to clean energy capable of powering both the irrigation of fields and the preservation of crops. Furthermore, this initiative is fully part of the global trajectory of a Just Energy Transition (Jetp), which intends to closely link international climate imperatives and social justice at the local level. By transforming solar potential into a real production tool, the country is drawing the contours of a decentralized and highly resilient development model. For decades, the glaring lack of modern energy infrastructure has acted as an invisible but extremely stubborn brake on the Senegalese rural economy. Weakly equipped to process their products after harvest or to keep them cool, farmers and fishermen saw a considerable part of their labor evaporate in inevitable post-harvest losses. For women who have historically been at the center of micro-processing and marketing activities, the absence of modern solutions meant that every day was a painful physical effort with very little economic return.

However, a first experimental phase demonstrated that a solid and lasting alternative was perfectly possible in the field. Thanks to the strategic installation of 16 multifunctional solar platforms distributed throughout the country’s 14 regions, villages previously totally isolated from national networks were able to concretely test the positive impact of these local mini power plants. Building on this particularly encouraging initial success, the program is now moving up a gear to change scale. The objective is to deploy 200 new multifunctional solar platforms across the entire national territory.

Solar irrigation

In addition, these structures designed as real community energy hubs now include cold rooms for low-temperature storage, modern dryers for the valorization of crops as well as various equipment adapted to local sectors. By drastically reducing food waste, solar energy becomes the direct driver of multiple income-generating activities, thereby consolidating the local economic fabric and the financial autonomy of rural women. Alongside this essential off-field development, the major challenge of agricultural production finds its answer in the rational exploitation of groundwater. Faced with the constant and unpredictable surge in diesel prices, the historical dependence on thermal motor pumps had become a totally unbearable financial burden for small farms. It is precisely to break this vicious circle of debt that a vast national project to spread photovoltaic irrigation has been launched. In total, there are 4,500 solar pumps, divided between 4,000 submerged off-grid systems and 500 surface pumps, which must be gradually deployed in the different agricultural areas of the country. Furthermore, to circumvent the major obstacle of the initial acquisition cost which often remains prohibitive for small producers, an innovative mixed financing mechanism combining adapted bank credits, state subsidies and installment payments has been designed to democratize access to these cutting-edge technologies on a large scale. In addition to the significant and immediate reduction in operating costs for producers, this major paradigm shift promises to profoundly clean up the entire Senegalese agricultural model. It guarantees better rationalized management of water resources, sustainably secures yields in the face of repeated climatic hazards and reduces the overall carbon footprint of the primary sector. In addition, with the rigorous implementation of a sustainable system of maintenance and technical training for users, the project creates a real ecosystem of qualified local jobs that cannot be relocated.

Pathé NIANG