As the COVID-19 pandemic gains ground in the African continent, it will create havoc and unprecedented health and economic crisis. The crisis has exposed the robustness and resilience of the economies and services such as health systems around the world and it is disaster in the making while the pandemic is spreading fast to the African continent. This is alarming mainly because the continent has weak health system compounded by low access to modern and reliable electricity. It is also anticipated that the crisis will be brought ample opportunities and the African governments and the people should make coordinated and concerted effort in developing conducive business environment and exploit the opportunities presented to facilitate energy access focusing on clean and renewable energy technologies. This is a big test for the continent and thus it will either brought prosperity through facilitating universal energy access by effectively utilizing the opportunities brought by the crisis or the lack of energy access will continue affecting communities the ability to improve their livelihoods.

No abstract

Recent debates about Africa's energy future have been heated, often shaped by geopolitical interests, but detached from the context-specific climate and development realities that

a b s t r a c tThis paper investigates the influence of wake interaction and blockage on the performance of individual turbines in a staggered configuration in a tidal stream farm using the CFD based Immersed Body Force turbine modelling method. The inflow condition to each turbine is unknown in advance making it difficult to apply the correct loading to individual devices. In such cases, it is necessary to establish an appropriate range of operating points by varying the loading or body forces in order to understand the influence of wake interaction and blockage on the performance of the individual devices. The performance of the downstream turbines was heavily affected by the wake interaction from the upstream turbines, though there were accelerated regions within the farm which could be potentially used to increase the overall power extraction from the farm. Laterally closely packed turbines can improve the performance of those turbines due to the blockage effect, but this could also affect the performance of downstream turbines. Thus balancing both the effect of blockage and wake interaction continues to be a huge challenge for optimising the performance of devices in a tidal stream farm.

No abstract