[R-G] Toiling in the Dark: Africa’s Power Crisis

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/world/africa/29power.html>
July 29, 2007
Toiling in the Dark: Africa's Power Crisis
By MICHAEL WINES

LUSAKA, Zambia — It is not that Jacob Mwale minds irrigating the 11
acres of land he farms just east of Lusaka, Zambia's capital. It is
irrigating his 11 acres in the dead of night that angers him.

Two or three times a week, the Mwale farm abruptly loses power, like
the homes and businesses of some of Zambia's 300,000 other electricity
users. When the power returns, sometimes late in the evening, Mr.
Mwale's farmhands work overtime, watering the fields by moonlight.

"If they shut down the whole day, I have to work nights, and pay
extra," Mr. Mwale, 39, grumbled. "It's killing us."

Power blackouts — "load shedding," in utility jargon — are hardly
novel in sub-Saharan Africa, where many electricity grids remain
chewing-gum-and-baling-wire affairs. Even so, this year is different.
Perhaps 25 of the 44 sub-Saharan nations face crippling electricity
shortages, a power crisis that some experts call unprecedented.

The causes are manifold: strong economic growth in some places,
economic collapse in others, war, poor planning, population booms,
high oil prices and drought have combined to leave both industry and
residents short of power when many need it most.

"We've had no significant capital injection into generation and
transmission, from either the private or public sectors, for 15, maybe
20 years," said Lawrence Musaba, the manager of the Southern African
Power Pool, a 12-nation consortium of electricity utilities at the
continent's tip.

The implications go beyond candlelight suppers and extra blankets on
beds. The lack of reliable power has already begun to hamper the
region's development, clipping more than 2 percent off the annual
growth rates of the worst-hit African economies, according to the
World Bank. Some nations, like Ghana, have tried to deal with their
power crises by leasing huge teams of gas generators, producing
emergency power at exorbitant rates until power plants can be built.

In Nigeria, Angola and some other nations, virtually all businesses
and many residents run private generators to supplement faltering
public service, saddling economies with added costs and worsening
pollution.

"I've been on the 20th floor of an apartment building in Luanda, and
there would be generators on all the verandas, with the racket, the
fumes," said Anton Eberhard, a former electricity regulator and an
expert on power at the University of Cape Town. "And the lift isn't
working, because the main power supply is off."

In normal times, South Africa's muscular chain of power plants fills
the gaps of its neighbors. But South Africa now could experience up to
seven years of its own electricity shortages. Rolling blackouts
blanketed parts of the country in January, and sporadic power failures
have persisted since.

The gravity of this year's shortage is all the more apparent
considering how little electricity sub-Saharan Africa has to begin
with. Excluding South Africa, whose economy and power consumption
dwarf other nations', the region's remaining 700 million citizens have
access to roughly as much electricity as do the 38 million citizens of
Poland.

Much goes to industry: a single aluminum smelter near Mozambique's
capital, Maputo, gobbles four times as much power as the entire rest
of Mozambique. On average, the World Bank says, fewer than one in four
sub-Saharan Africans are hooked to national electricity grids.

Moreover, some grids are so poorly maintained that electricity
suppliers get paid for as little as 60 percent of the power they
generate. The rest is either stolen or lost in ill-maintained
networks.

For decades, the region had enough generating capacity — and few
enough customers — to tolerate such waste. No more: sub-Saharan
nations are adding about a thousand megawatts of generating capacity
each year, World Bank experts say, but need up to twice that to keep
pace with demand.

Some governments privatized chunks of their power industry in the
early 1990s when free-market solutions to public-sector problems were
in vogue, leaving it unclear who is ultimately responsible for
providing power.

Other governments, as in South Africa, failed to build power plants
that experts warned were needed. The government monopoly Eskom, the
world's fourth-largest power utility, was advised in a 1998 report
that it would run short of power in 2007, but planning and financing
problems — not all within the utility's control — stalled upgrades.
The forecast was actually optimistic: Eskom began running short in
2006.

Yet South Africa's woes pale beside those of Nigeria, Africa's most
populous nation. Only 19 of 79 power plants work, the government said
in April. Daily electricity output has plunged 60 percent from its
peak, and blackouts cost the economy $1 billion a year, the Council
for Renewable Energy in Nigeria says.

Poor management is but one problem. War has devastated the power grid
in Congo, in Africa's heart, and stalled plans to develop its vast
hydroelectric potential. In Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and parts of West
Africa, drought has shrunk rivers and slashed the generating capacity
of hydroelectric dams. Drought in Ghana, for example, has crippled
gold and aluminum production and set off blackouts in Togo and Benin,
which buy power from Ghana.

Once a major power exporter, Uganda now blacks out parts of its
capital, Kampala, for as much as a day at a time and has leased two
50-megawatt generators, burning diesel at a time of record oil prices.
The demand for hydropower in Uganda and its neighbors, with drought,
is blamed by some for a steady reduction in the water level of Lake
Victoria, Africa's largest.

Uganda's gas stations are now short of diesel for vehicles — in part,
paradoxically, because power shortages are shutting down a pipeline
from Kenya. News reports say the nation has spent enough on
diesel-fueled power generation to build two hydroelectric dams.

Zambia, where power to customers like Mr. Mwale is rationed almost
every day, is a template for such problems. Barely 20 percent of
households are wired for power — only 3 percent in rural areas — but
the Zambia Electricity Supply Company, known as Zesco, is signing up
10,000 new customers a year, said Christopher Nthala, the utility's
transmission director.

Now Zambia is getting a push: a global commodities boom has jolted its
moribund metals industry to life. Investors are building two smelters,
and doubling the capacity of another, to handle the boom in copper,
nickel and other metals, taxing the nation's power supply.

"We've never seen this kind of growth before," Mr. Nthala said.

Once the utility could make up shortfalls by buying power from other
utilities in the Southern Africa Power Pool. But today, Mr. Nthala
said, neighbors have little surplus to hand out. "Sometimes we get
it," he said. "Sometimes we don't."

None of that mollifies customers, who say blackouts are so common that
service in much of Lusaka has become totally unreliable.

Many power failures seem to hit Matero, a poor township that is home
to maybe a million of Lusaka's estimated three million residents.
"Every day — it's either in the morning, when people are going to work
or preparing to cook, or in the evening, the prime time when I'm tired
and I need to go home and listen to the news and cook my supper," said
Bishop Peter Ndhlovu, who leads the 250,000-member Bible Gospel
Church, an evangelical movement.

Nighttime prayer meetings in his corrugated-roof chapel have been
canceled. Bishop Ndhlovu and others say they lave lost refrigerators,
televisions and DVD players to the utility's blackouts and surges.

Most of the township's residents have adapted by turning away from
their stoves and instead cooking outdoors, village-style, with
homemade charcoal. "Charcoal is going very fast, because they've found
out that Zesco is cutting power unpredictably," the bishop said.

On Lusaka's eastern outskirts, Mr. Mwale, the farmer, also has laid in
a stock of charcoal — not to cook, but to warm his stock of newborn
chicks, which must be kept at a constant 90 degrees for the three
weeks after hatching.

He said he worried about the environment. Charcoal production is a
major contributor to deforestation in Zambia and nearby nations. But
the alternative is to take a loss on his poultry business.

"When they make a loss, they just raise their tariff," he said of
Zesco. "When I make a loss, I have to make it up myself. Is that
fair?"

Zambia's plan, like the plans of dozens of other nations, is to build
its way out of the power crunch. Zesco plans $1.2 billion in
generating upgrades and new capacity, financed mostly by China and
India. South Africa plans more than $20 billion in upgrades; Congo is
contemplating a hydroelectric station that by itself would increase
capacity outside South Africa by 50 to 75 percent.

The World Bank says its financing of power projects in sub-Saharan
Africa is ballooning, from $250 million five years ago to $660 million
last year to $1 billion in 2007.

But many plans remain just that. Issues like creditworthiness, lax
regulation, domestic politics and the sheer difficulty of sending
power over rundown grids to the customer make outside investments in
power stations tougher than they appear, said Tore Horvei, the chief
operating officer of CIC Energy Corporation, which is based in South
Africa.

The best answer, most experts consulted agree, would be for nations to
cooperate on regional power solutions. One or two large regional
plants, they say, could supply power more cheaply and efficiently than
dozens of smaller ones.

But while that may be logical, Mr. Horvei said, "it's very challenging
in practice to do so."

"National pride and everything else comes in," he added.

There is an alternative: saving energy. Namibia plans a wind farm on
its southern coast, while in South Africa, Eskom has handed out five
million fluorescent bulbs and 140,000 insulating blankets for water
heaters, and has paid industrial customers to switch off equipment
during periods of high demand.

--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>