DR Congo: ANSER signs 650 MW solar pipeline with ITRA, and no timetable

ANSER, the DRC's agency for electrification and energy services in rural and peri-urban areas, signed a memorandum of understanding with French firm ITRA Group on 1 September to identify, prepare and develop solar projects across the country. The agency puts the combined target at 650 MW, the capital required at around $900m, and the direct jobs created at roughly 5,000. The memorandum covers site identification and project preparation. Construction sits outside it.

The pipeline

Four sites are named: Mbujimayi, Lubumbashi, Likasi and Kolwezi, with individual plants ranging from 50 MW to 300 MW. Three of the four sit in the copper belt of Haut-Katanga and Lualaba, where mining loads are concentrated; Mbujimayi is in Kasaï-Oriental. None is rural, which is worth registering given the mandate of the agency signing the paper. For scale, the largest individual project under ANSER's current decentralized program is a 3 MW plant at Nioki, awarded in June.

The schedule

There isn't one. ANSER published no target dates, no financial close window, and no construction start. The agreement covers site identification, project preparation and development structuring, and the agency states that everything thereafter depends on financial structuring, site validation, and feasibility studies before the $900m can be mobilized. At the stated figures, the pipeline implies about $1.4m of capital per megawatt.

Who is ITRA Group

ITRA is based in Vergèze, in France's Gard department, and works across solar photovoltaics, electrical installations, EV charging, air conditioning and heat pumps. According to Ecofin Agency, the references published on the company's own website cover mainly small and medium-sized photovoltaic installations in France, which do not establish a track record at the scale now under discussion in the DRC. ANSER has not said why it selected ITRA, and no competitive process was announced.

What it means

What it means for developers and EPCs ITRA arrives with installation and off-grid experience rather than a utility-scale portfolio, and that is the opening. Plants of 50 to 300 MW will need civil works, high-voltage interconnection, land preparation, and long-term maintenance, none of which can be delivered from Vergèze (France). Every one of those scopes is contractible locally. ITRA's advertised strengths, standalone sites and storage-backed self-consumption, also point toward the industrial self-supply model the copper belt already runs on, which is a more bankable starting point than grid export. Firms that make themselves visible during the feasibility phase will hold the site knowledge when packages are let.

Sources: Bankable, ecofinagency, SolarQuater