- The African Development Bank has released a more detailed report of the funding needs for the South Sudan – Uganda power interconnection line.
- South Sudan desperately needs this power interconnection project with Uganda to work out as the nation has the lowest rate of its population accessing electricity, at just five per cent.
The African Development Bank has released a more detailed report of the funding needs for the South Sudan – Uganda power interconnection line, its associated substations and distribution lines, pointing to some key changes in both the cost and design of the project from what Uganda had earlier released.
The report into a project that is years behind schedule notes that the total project cost is now close to $260 million, more than the $164.7 million that Uganda had estimated in its Grid Development Plan for the years 2023 to 2040, which was compiled by the Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Limited.
The African Development Bank has promised to intervene with $155 million of the project cost in loans and grants, according to its Appraisal Report for the Multinational South Sudan – Uganda Power Interconnection Project, dated November 2024. The European Union will also pick some of the tab with a grant of $27.1 million.
Construction of this critical 400kV transmission line is expected to start in 2026 and conclude in 2029, according to the African Development Bank report, more than 10 years after the two countries agreed to put it up.
In December 2015, Uganda and South Sudan agreed to have a power interconnection line as South Sudan emerged from the ruins of a long protracted internal war. Just two years earlier in Uganda, construction of the country’s biggest hydropower project – the 600MW Karuma – had started, and it was envisaged that there would be excess supply of electricity. Finding new markets for this electricity was critical.
The AfDB has drawn up a budget of about $155.2 million that it plans to commit to the project, split between a loan and a grant.
AfDB plans to give Uganda a loan of $121.9 million towards construction works within its side of the border, while South Sudan will receive a grant of $33.25 million. Uganda will also come up with counterpart funding of $17.8 million towards the project. AfDB also intends to give the Nile Basin Initiative – the organisation that will coordinate this project – a grant of close to $2 million.
If the project succeeds, it will loop in South Sudan into the East Africa Power Pool, an initiative that seeks to connect transmission projects among the countries within the regional bloc.
South Sudan desperately needs this power interconnection project with Uganda to work out. Africa’s youngest nation has the lowest rate of its population accessing electricity, at just five per cent. The country has an installed electricity generation capacity of 141MW, with demand estimated to be twice more than that, at over 300MW. To make matters tougher, a lot of the available 141MW is generated using the more expensive and dirtier heavy fuel oil.
South Sudan also has some institutional challenges within its set-up as the country lacks a regulatory body for its electricity supply industry. The National Electricity Bill (2015), which would create the legal and governance framework of the sector and attract more independent power producers, is yet to be enacted.