Access to reliable power is essential for any modern economy, increasing the productivity of both industry and agriculture and creating new opportunities for the service sector. However, hundreds of millions of people across sub-Saharan Africa still have no access to electricity. Even where the grid exists, blackouts are common with households and firms often experiencing outages for several hours a day. Brownouts and voltage surges can further limit end users' utilisation of electricity and can cause damage to connected appliances. These challenges result in significant costs for existing enterprises and place constraints on the opportunities for new business creation.

As a result, sub-Saharan Africa now has a total capacity of backup petrol and diesel generators roughly equal to the combined installed capacity of all power plants on the grid. Power produced in this way is noisy, polluting, expensive, and incompatible with the urgent need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Nevertheless, a lack of affordable alternatives continues to drive an expansion of the backup fossil-fuel generator market.

The emergence of small, efficient, free-stream, hydro-kinetic river turbines capable of economically generating electricity from fast-flowing water is a new development. They use technology transferred from the tidal energy sector, in which the UK has been a world-leader since it began, about twenty years ago.

Hydro-kinetic technology is fundamentally different to conventional hydro power that extracts energy from rivers as they drop through a height, or 'head'. Hydro-kinetic turbines are installed directly into the flow of a river and so are easily deployed without civil engineering works. They can offer affordable, reliable power to businesses located near to large, fast-flowing rivers.

In this project, Kinetic Hydro Ltd will investigate the opportunities to apply their river turbine technology to new markets in sub-Saharan Africa where fossil fuel generators are currently the incumbent solution. This will unlock new revenue streams for the business, save money for their customers, and reduce pollution and carbon emissions by displacing fossil-fuel generation.