Kuungana Advisory

Our Managing Director, Stephen Nash, will be in Washington, DC, from 4th-7th March. Do get in touch if you would like to connect. Stephen will be at the Powering Africa Summit on the 6th-7th, and is available to meet on 4th-5th.

Merry Christmas for all of us at Kuungana! We wrapped up 2024 yesterday with a lovely team lunch at Akub. Before that we were guided through the Climate Fresk workshop by Laudie J., who joined us earlier this year. We used Climate Fresk to explore some of the complexities of the climate crisis and to challenge ourselves on the actions that we can take as a firm and individually to mitigate our impact on the crisis. While driving the energy transition in countries where trade-offs with economic development can be very real is at the heart of our day jobs, it is always important to step back and challenge ourselves to do more as individuals as well. We have secured some really exciting projects at the sharp edge of these challenges in recent weeks, and we look forward to sharing more about these early next year! Laudie J., Tim Morgan Boyd, Katrina Christine Dasalla, Alex Lusak, Tassneem Sabry

We are delighted to have supported British International Investment (BII) and GuarantCo on a landmark $100m guarantee facility for Etana Energy. Kuungana acted as commercial and risk advisor on the transaction, building detailed portfolio and financial models which were used to evaluate the first-of-a-kind structure being deployed under a number of different market design scenarios. This deal is a key milestone for South Africa's electricity market as it continues to liberalise. We look forward to continuing to support companies and investors working in South Africa, and further afield across the continent. If you would like to hear more about our work in South Africa and elsewhere, please reach out to Stephen Nash. A big shout out to members of our team who worked on the deal (Alex Lusak, Laudie J., Tassneem Sabry) and congratulations to the Etana, BII, and GuarantCo teams on closing this.

The role of regional trade in facilitating the integration of more renewable energy capacity is moving up the agenda across many of the countries we work in. Trade can be especially important in the middle and low income countries we are focused on, because the size of an individual country's market is often small. But trade does not just need physical interconnectors; it needs flexible and responsive market arrangements. These do not exist in many places. In the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP), the volumes traded on the day-ahead market remain small. Across ASEAN, most cross-border power trade remains blocky, bilateral, and unidirectional. Focusing on SAPP, we've been analysing the impact of regional market arrangements in unlocking the benefits of electricity trade in a high renewables world. Tim Morgan Boyd has prepared a new blog outlining our findings. This builds on modelling work by Emily Donald, who recently completed a summer internship with us. See a summary of our work below, and read more here: https://lnkd.in/eiZsZk3F Get in touch with Stephen, Tim, or any of the team at Kuungana to learn more about our country-level or regional power market dispatch models. #renewables #powermarkets #powertrade

Our Managing Director, Stephen Nash, will be attending AIX Power and Renewables in London next week. Do get in touch with Stephen if you want to catch up and discuss our recent work, both in Africa and elsewhere.

Our latest blog post has just been published - follow the link below. In this post, Tim Morgan Boyd and Tassneem Sabry use our in-house planning model to explore the role of storage and the trade-offs involved in determining how much storage is required for bulk energy shifting, using one of the many African countries that we frequently model as an example. Do get in touch with Tim, Tassneem, or Stephen Nash if you would like to learn more about our modelling capabilities, or if it would be useful to discuss the issues discussed in this blog post further.

We're growing.... 🚀 and are delighted to welcome Laudie J. to the Kuungana Advisory team this week. Laudie was previously a core member of the Net Zero Strategy Consulting team at Monitor Deloitte. We're all looking forward to working with Laudie on our projects at the heart of the energy transition in middle and low income countries.

Our latest blog, written by Tim Morgan Boyd, focuses on how the landscape for corporate procurement of renewables is evolving in the developing countries where we work. Vietnam recently finalised its DPPA mechanism to facilitate the direct procurement of renewables by corporates, but this is far from an isolated example. This blog highlights some of the trends that we're seeing in the market. The blog also highlights some of the implications for energy sector regulation as these markets open up. We are of course working with a wide range of clients impacted by these trends - if you are keen to hear more about our work do get in touch! #renewables #cppa #dppa

We all had a break from the office at the end of last week for our annual retreat. It was great to spend time together as a team to develop our plans for the next year and also to do something completely different... On Thursday we were based at Barnett Hill Hotel, just outside Guildford, to share some of our recent project experiences , to work through exciting developments to our in-house modelling infrastructure, and to discuss our strategic priorities for the coming year. On Friday we stretched our brains in a different direction, with a day of willow weaving with the brilliant Lorraine Ellery Matthews at Hedges & Hurdles Corporate Experiences. We were tasked with building bird boxes (modelled below 😄), which will now be positioned in the garden area at Gosden House School - a local state special school. We hope that the birds enjoy their (rustic!) new homes and that they provide a welcome addition to an important outdoor space at the school. Stephen Nash, Tim Morgan Boyd, Katrina Christine Dasalla, Tassneem Sabry, Alex Lusak, Laudie J., Emily Donald

Over the last year, as part of an engagement with the Southeast Asia Energy Transition Partnership, our team has been busy engaging with stakeholders across Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, analysing the existing mechanisms in place for renewables procurement and evaluating the opportunities for scaling up the role of competition in future procurement. Our full final report can be found below. There is lots of detail in the report, but we highlight three common themes across the region: 📑 Planning for renewable energy. All three countries have power sector plans and/or renewable energy targets in place. However, there is often a disconnect between those plans and procurement timelines. 📌 Securing land use rights and electricity network capacity. Land ownership is often fragmented in the region, and the process to secure land use rights can be time consuming and result in delays. Securing a grid connection can also be challenging, and in many areas the transmission network may be unable to support new projects. 🤝 Refining the allocation of risks between projects and offtakers. While the specifics vary between the three countries analysed, in all three countries, PPAs for renewable energy have typically included terms that depart from international norms. While an impressive amount of capacity has sometimes been procured under these terms, there is likely to be a limit to how far the sector can scale without changes to the commercial terms under which new capacity is contracted. Country-specific reports, together with an Indonesian Bahasa version of the report for Indonesia, can be found on the ETP website, here: https://lnkd.in/eMvDhhu9 Do get in touch with us if you have any questions about the report. A big thank you to Dimas Fauzi and the rest of the Southeast Asia Energy Transition Partnership team for engaging us for this assignment and for the collaboration throughout, and to our key stakeholders in each of the three countries - too long a list to include here but a big thank you! 🙏 Stephen Nash, Katrina Christine Dasalla, David Lockhart, Ifnaldi Sikumbang, Carlo Borlaza, Van Nguyen Nhu, Hung N. Nguyen