Since launching its Developer Services business in 2009, Wind Prospect has opened offices in emerging markets across Europe including most recently Turkey and Poland.
The African office will open in Cape Town in October of this year and will service the whole of the African continent, providing wind resource assessment, due diligence and development support services to developers, banks and financial institutions.
Wind Prospect is already working on 11 contracts across Kenya and South Africa, representing 1.3GW of potential capacity. The company describes this capacity as “a major increase” on the continent’s capacity installed to date, which was calculated at 770 MW, in the World Wind Energy Report 2009. This report calculates that this capacity amounts to 0.5 % of total worldwide capacity. 169 MW of Africa's total capacity is located in Egypt and Morocco.
“Africa is set to become a major international market for renewables. South Africa in particular has huge coal reserves, but is making great progress to reduce its fossil fuel reliance and turn to alternative ways of generating energy,” said Wind Prospect’s Head of Advisory Services, David Groves, adding that “with over 20 years’ experience of developing wind energy projects around the world and a global network of over 200 staff; we will be ideally positioned to help underpin this market growth and to provide a heightened level of support to our existing clients”.
As the market grows, Wind Prospect plans to offer additional services and open further offices across the continent. For now the focus remains the ‘financial capital’ of Africa and the burgeoning wind market.
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