Qair reaches first disbursement on €37.9m financing for Chad's first utility-scale hybrid solar plants

Independent renewable energy company Qair has announced the first disbursement of a €37.9 million financing package for the construction of hybrid solar power plants with battery storage, totaling 30 MWp and 8 MWh, located in Gassi and Lamadji, Chad — among the first utility-scale solar-plus-storage projects in the country.

The disbursement, announced on 25 September 2026, closes a financing story that began well before the money moved. The two plants — Gassi-Bagoum and Lamadji-Achawail, both in N'Djamena neighbourhoods — broke ground at a ceremony on 16 May 2025, attended by Chadian national and local authorities, the national electricity company, the African Development Bank and Proparco. What the ceremony celebrated was an experiment: whether a frontier market with almost no bankable power infrastructure could host a properly financed, privately built plant at all.

Why Chad, and why now

Chad is about as hard a market as renewable development gets. Only 12% of the population had access to electricity as of 2023, according to World Bank data — below 50% even in urban areas — and petroleum products accounted for 98% of the country's electricity generation in 2022, per the IEA. Power outages in N'Djamena remain frequent. The two plants, each 15 MWp supported by a 4 MW / 4 MWh battery system, are designed for exactly this reality: 48,500 bifacial modules on solar trackers feeding 65 GWh a year — enough for roughly 260,000 people — and, unusually, blackstart capability that lets the system restart itself after a total grid outage.

The commercial wrapper is a 20-year BOOT (build, own, operate, transfer) contract with the Chadian state, under which the plants transfer to the government for a symbolic sum at the end of the term, paired with a 20-year PPA with Tchadelec, the national electricity utility. Qair targets commissioning of both plants in 2025–2026.

A textbook blended-finance structure for frontier markets

The financial structure is a case study in how frontier-market hybrid projects are made bankable:

• African Development Bank (AfDB) and Proparco each provided €15.2 million in loans;
• The Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA), managed by the AfDB, contributed €6 million in reimbursable grants;
• Proparco / Agence Française de Développement added €1.5 million in supplementary funding;
• A €8 million Partial Risk Guarantee (PRG), issued by the African Development Fund and the Green Climate Fund, backs a letter of credit from Coris Bank covering Tchadelec's PPA payment obligations;
• Coris Bank serves as onshore account bank and local security agent, while BNY acts as offshore account bank, offshore security agent and intercreditor agent.

For Qair itself, the deal is a statement of strategy. The French group — 1.7 GW in operation, 800 employees, a 30 GW pipeline across 20 countries — has been building an African book of roughly 2 GW spanning Tunisia, Morocco, Burkina Faso, Mauritius, the Seychelles and now Chad, deliberately weighted toward hybrid technologies in markets that global developers ignore. "This financing demonstrates the strong confidence and collaboration between Qair, AfDB, Proparco, and SEFA in delivering impactful renewable energy infrastructure," said Abdoulaye Touré, CFO of Qair Africa. Marc Galinier, its director for sub-Saharan Africa, has framed the model as proof that "when the public and private sectors join forces, extraordinary achievements are possible."

For equipment suppliers and integrators, projects of this type illustrate where the next wave of African demand is forming: small-capacity hybrid plants in markets with almost no existing generation infrastructure, financed through DFI-blended structures, with PPAs anchored on national utilities. The English-language media coverage of such markets remains close to zero — a persistent information gap for anyone tracking where procurement actually happens.