Zambia's 100 MW Maamba solar plant reaches the grid on a 20-year PPA at $0.078/kWh
Victoria Shinder2 min readIndian conglomerate Nava Limited has announced the commissioning of a 100 MW solar plant in Zambia. The project was built by Maamba Solar Energy Limited, a Zambian company in which Nava holds 65 per cent and ZCCM Investments Holding the remaining 35. It sits in the Sinazongwe district of Zambia's southern province and is connected to the national grid.
MSEL holds a 20-year power purchase agreement with the state utility ZESCO covering the entire output, signed at a tariff of $0.078/kWh according to a Nava disclosure from May 2025. Total investment was around $90 million, financed with debt and equity from both shareholders. The groundbreaking ceremony was in September 2025, which puts construction at roughly a year.
What it means
The number that carries the story is the tariff. At 7.8 US cents a kilowatt-hour on a twenty-year contract, this is priced as infrastructure rather than as a demonstration, and it is priced in a market where the utility's ability to pay is the binding constraint on every generation project. A PPA is only as good as the offtaker, and that is the risk the two shareholders have taken between them.
The ownership split is the other thing worth noting. ZCCM is a Zambian state investment holding, so 35 per cent of the equity sits on the same side of the table as the offtaker — an arrangement that aligns interests when the tariff comes under pressure, which on a twenty-year horizon it will. Zambia's grid depends heavily on hydro, and the practical value of 100 MW of solar there is not that it is clean but that it produces when the reservoirs are low and the rains have not come. That is a capacity argument, not an emissions one, and it is the one that makes the next hundred megawatts easier to finance.