By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 14
Solar farms compete for the same commodity as grazing – open ground and sunlight. Omburu is a land-use choice as much as an energy one.
Strip away the megawatts and Omburu is a question about land. The plant occupies about 40 hectares of semi-arid ground near Omaruru, in a region where the same open, sunlit terrain is more usually given to livestock and thin dryland grazing. Choosing to put solar there is a land-use decision, and the plant’s clean-energy case has to be weighed on those terms.
That framing belongs to food systems and sustainability before it belongs to engineering. A country that is largely arid has to decide what its marginal land is worth, and whether covering some of it in panels is the highest use of ground that grazes stock poorly and grows crops barely at all.
Marginal land, higher-value sun
The Erongo interior is not prime farmland. Rainfall is low and erratic, grazing is sparse, and much of the ground supports only extensive livestock at low stocking rates. On land like that, the energy value of the sunlight can exceed the food value of the grass, which is the quiet economic case for siting solar on semi-arid ground rather than on scarce arable soil.
That is the sustainability trade stated honestly. Every hectare under panels is a hectare not grazed, but on marginal ground the opportunity cost is low, and the same sun that barely grows fodder generates power reliably all year.
On dry ground, sunlight can be worth more as electricity than the grass it fails to grow.
The emissions it quietly displaces
A solar plant’s environmental case is mostly in what it replaces. Omburu’s expected 67.8 gigawatt-hours a year substitute for power that would otherwise be imported or generated by burning fuel, so each unit it produces avoids the emissions of the coal and diesel further up the supply chain. The benefit is easy to miss because it is a thing that does not happen.
For a country pledged to source 70 per cent of its energy from renewables by 2030, that displacement is the point. Clean domestic generation is how the target is met, and a plant on low-value land that burns nothing is close to the ideal unit of it.
The greenest thing about Omburu is the fuel it means the grid never has to burn.
Water, the real scarcity
In arid Namibia the binding resource is water, not land, and here solar has a genuine advantage. A photovoltaic plant uses almost no water to generate, unlike the thermal and hydro stations that dominate the region’s supply, so it produces power without drawing on a resource the country cannot spare.
The one demand solar does make is cleaning. Panels lose output when dust settles, so some water is needed to keep them productive, and in a dry region that cleaning regime has to be designed with care.
Set against the alternatives, the balance is still favourable. Hydro depends on a Kunene River whose flow is uncertain and largely governed upstream in Angola, and thermal generation consumes both fuel and cooling water. Solar sidesteps both dependencies, trading a large but one-off claim on land for a running process that leaves the region’s water almost untouched, which in a drought-prone country is a durable kind of advantage.
Solar’s best fit to Namibia is that it makes power without spending the water the country lacks.
The stewardship read
For anyone in land management or agribusiness, Omburu is a marker of a choice arid regions everywhere are starting to face: whether marginal grazing land is better used to harvest sun. Done on genuinely low-value ground, it turns an underused asset into steady income and clean power without displacing food production that was never viable there.
The risk is that good solar ground and good grazing ground are not always distinct, and future plants may sit on better land where the trade is real. The discipline Omburu models – putting panels where the grass is thinnest – is the one that keeps the land-use case sound.
The land-use test is simple: build where the sun is worth more than the grazing, and no further.
For a farmer, a conservationist or anyone weighing rural land use, Omburu is a reminder that Namibia’s dry interior now has two possible harvests – livestock and light – and that on the most marginal ground the second may pay better and cost the environment less. The decision it poses to landholders and planners is where the line sits: which ground is thin enough that a solar field is its highest use, and which should stay open for the stock and the wildlife the region’s tourism and food systems still depend on.
Sources: NamPower 2022 Annual Report; NamPower inaugurates its 20 MWp Omburu solar PV plant (Afrik 21); 20MW Omburu solar power plant inaugurated (Namibia Economist)
