Aggreko on energy security for African mines: hybrid power design notes for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on International Mining – News
30 Second Briefing
Brent crude jumping from $92 to over $113 per barrel in a single week is used by Edith Kikonyogo, Managing Director of Aggreko Africa, to argue that African mines should cut exposure to fuel price volatility by shifting from pure thermal generation to hybrid power. She points to integrating diesel or HFO with solar PV, battery energy storage systems and, where available, grid connections to stabilise costs and improve supply resilience. For mine planners and power engineers, the message is to design modular, multi-source plants rather than locking into single-fuel genset fleets.
Technical Brief
- Modular plant layouts are promoted so mines can reconfigure thermal/renewable ratios as orebody economics change.
- Rental or BOO power models are cited as a way to avoid long-term lock‑in to one fuel.
- Kikonyogo stresses that power strategies should be revisited at each life‑of‑mine update, not fixed at DFS.
- For other remote mining projects, the argument is to embed volatility scenarios into early power trade‑off studies.
Our Take
In our Mining corpus, Africa appears more often in power and infrastructure op-eds than in pure project build stories, suggesting operators there are still heavily constrained by grid reliability and are more likely to lean on providers like Aggreko Africa for modular and transitional power rather than fully integrated owner-built plants.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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