wiredInUSA June 2020

PNG Internet platform

Solar park presses on to the next stage

PNG Dataco has landed the Kumul Submarine Cable Network (KSCN) in Kavieng, New Ireland Province, in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The KSCN is a 5,457km domestic Internet platform to link fourteen provinces and two national data centers in Port Moresby and Madang, PNG. The KSCN also connects to Jakarta, through Indonesia’s national backbone submarine cable network, and to Asia. The latest landing will connect Kavieng and the New Ireland Province to the rest of the world. PNG Dataco’s general manager of engineering services, Tony Morisause, said: “Once we land the cable in Kavieng, then the distribution through the retail service providers will go out to all the small islands and along the Buluminski Highway to Namatanai.” He added that PNG Dataco’s team will work with the New Ireland provincial government to ensure that the province gains full advantage of the infrastructure.

Photograph courtesy of Gulf News Following its October 2019 call for bids, Dubai Electricity and Water Authority has awarded the 900MW photovoltaic fifth phase of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park to a consortium led by ACWA Power with a tariff of $1.6953 cents/ kWh. The fifth phase, at a cost of $570 million, will bring the production capacity of the solar park to 2,863MW. The fifth phase alone is expected to power 270,000 Dubai homes and offset carbon emissions amounting to 1.18 million tons per year. The project will use the latest bifacial photovoltaic solar panels, which capture sunlight on both sides of the panel and use an advanced solar tracking system to increase generation efficiency. Once complete, the Mohammed bin Rashid Solar Park is expected to be the largest single-site solar park in the world, with a planned production capacity of 5,000MW. Phases one to three are in operation, and the 950MW phase four is under construction.

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wiredInUSA - June 2020