Our efforts have once again been honoured with a nomination as a finalist for The smarter E AWARD 2022, this time with our project partner Suntrace GmbH, which is responsible for the development and implementation and detailed engineering and procurement support of the outstanding hybrid power plant in southwestern Mali, at B2Gold’s Fekola Mine.
“Reuniwatt provides highly accurate weather data and solar power forecasts for B2Gold's Fekola Mine in Mali. The project is a milestone in the development of the 21st century power supply for the energy-intensive mining industry, in Africa and worldwide. We are very pleased that our efforts to provide reliable solar power to an off-grid mine with 24-hour operations are setting an example for the mining industry worldwide, but are also honoured with a nomination as a finalist for The smarter E AWARD 2022 in the category « Outstanding Projects » together with our project partner Suntrace.”, says Nicolas Schmutz, CEO of Reuniwatt.
Off-grid mining businesses have the opportunity to drive down energy costs through the hybridisation of their power supply and effective energy management relying on renewables as a major component. More importantly, renewables enable those companies to significantly reduce emissions and preserve a mine’s social license to operate. B2Gold completed their hybrid project at Fekola Mine in August 2021, where 36MWp/30MWac of PV capacity have been combined with 17.3 MW/15.4 MWh battery storage and its thermal unit (4×1.64MW Diesel Gensets and 8×7.25MW HFO Gensets). Solar production forecasts are a basic requirement to optimise fuel savings in Fekola Mine’s microgrid combining energy storage with solar power and gensets. Reuniwatt's infrared all-sky imager Sky InSight™ takes images of the sky at high frequency (every 1min or less) onsite, from which Reuniwatt’s forecasting service InstaCast™ derives high-precision irradiance and solar power forecasts used to optimize storage management and genset scheduling.
The cost-saving potential and technical concept for the Fekola solar-battery hybrid system combined with solar forecasting solutions was initially evaluated in a feasibility study by Suntrace together with BayWa r.e., followed by the engineering and realization of the project. The fuel savings achievable through the hybridisation of the existing HFO gensets are based on the share of cheap solar power replacing almost 20% of the annual HFO demand, and hedging future energy cost in light of volatile fuel prices. According to B2Gold, the hybridisation will save 13.1 million litres of heavy fuel oil per year and reduce gold processing costs by at least 7%. The sophisticated EMS provided by Wärtsilä enables the optimisation of genset schedules to ensure the lowest LCOE while also optimising charge cycles for energy storage. The joint effort of all project partners has made this project a success and milestone for renewables in mining.
