Aera has been appointed as carbon certification technical advisor and carbon credits buyer for the 88MW Mount Coffee hydropower plant in Liberia.
The upgraded Mount Coffee project was officially inaugurated back in late 2016. The original Mount Coffee Hydropower Plant was constructed over a four year period and began generation in 1967. The plant is located approximately 25km north of the Liberian capital, Monrovia. It operated successfully for twenty-three years until 1990 when, during the first of two civil wars, the dam was overtopped and eventually breached over a length of approximately 180m.
The powerhouse, which housed four Francis turbines with a total installed capacity of 64MW at the time, was flooded and later stripped of all its mechanical and electrical equipment. The output of the new units is substantially upgraded to 22MW each. The project adopted a fast track approach, but progress halted in 2014 due to the emergence of an unprecedented Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
