The Eastern Africa Power Pool (EAPP), which vies for regional power interconnection, has selected a Tanzanian Secretary General, with a dissatisfied Egyptian delegation hinting that their country might not want to import power from Ethiopia.
The EAPP was established in 2005 with the vision of creating the more vibrant power market, providing an efficient and reliable electricity supply through a fully integrated and interconnected regional system at a very low cost. Its 10 members extend from Tanzania to Libya.
Based in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, the EAPP is also adopted as a specialised institution to foster power system interconnectivity by the heads of state of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) region. There are also four other regional power pools in Africa.
The EAPP has membercountries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Ethiopia, with huge power generation potential. It held its extraordinary conference of Ministers meeting on Friday April 25, 2014, at the Hilton Hotel on Menelik II Avenue in Addis Abeba. The meeting was conducted with the attendance of the African Development Bank (AfDB), USAID, the World Bank, the European Union and the Norwegian and Swedish governments.
The meeting, which also addressed budget issues in addition to picking its leader, has also become another platform where the disagreement between Ethiopia and Egypt over how to utilise the water resources of the region was witnessed.
Among the projects that are to be undertaken in the power pool, mentioned by Azeb Asnake, CEO of Ethiopian Electric Power, was the Ethiopia-Sudan-Egypt 3,200 MW power transmission line. This is to be finalised by the end of the decade and will be constructed under the eastern Nile basin cooperation – a framework between the three countries in existence since 1999.
According to the cooperation framework set in 2009, 1,200 MW of electricity will be transmitted to Sudan, while the rest will flow to Egypt. It is one of the projects that is planned to be implemented by the power pool, but the Egyptian delegate has other ideas.
“The 2009 agreement for the Ethiopia-Sudan-Egypt transmission of power was on the assumption that the power will be provided from three smaller dams, two of them to be built on the Blue Nile and one on the White Nile in Sudan,”said Abdel Rahim A-Helmi Hamza, an official with the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Corporation (EETC).
The Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) came into the picture after 2010.
“The GERD was not mentioned at the time, and it will be hard for us to buy electricity produced from this dam,” Abdel Rahim told Fortune.
Ethiopia should address the concerns of Egypt, which has an economy that could accommodate 3,000MW of electricity.
Mihret Debebe, a former power utility head and now energy policy, strategy and international affairs advisor at the Ministry of Water, Irrigation & Energy (MoWIE), downplayed the accusation as an excuse not to be a part of the project.
“The eastern Nile basin cooperation was able to implement none of its projects, so member nations, including Sudan and Egypt, have gone on to build their own dams and GERD is part of this trend,” he told Fortune.
Mihret doesn’t worry about finding a market once the dams are finalised either, mentioning the Middle East and the Southern Africa Power Pool as potential markets.
“This is a voluntary association based on mutual willingness to trade energy,” said Alemayehu Tegenu, minister of the MoWIE.
Though it is the youngest power pool on the continent, with various projects that interconnect countries like Ethiopia with Kenya, Tanzania with Kenya, Ethiopia with Sudan and Djibouti and Sudan with Egypt,the EAPP is growing fast, according to Gafar Ali Elbashir, CEO of the Sudanese Electricity Transmission Company, though almost all of the projects are bilateral interconnections.
These kinds of developments have garnered interests and finance from multilateral, as well bilateral, sources.
“We have financed different projects in the region, including the more than 1.5 billion dollars we provide for the Ethio-Kenya project,” Gabriel Nigatu, regional director of the Eastern Africa Resource Centre at the AfDB, told Fortune.
Gabriel,who was also the voice of the development partners at the meeting, raised his concern of inefficiency and labour duplication at the institution, while reiterating donors’ commitment to finance priority projectsof the power pool, which will continue until 2015.
The Norwegian and Swedish governments are also providing technical support, which, so far, amounts to 6.5 million dollars, according to Lars Ekman, counsellor for the Norwegian Embassy in Addis Abeba, who did not want to specifically comment on the Ethio-Sudanese-Egyptian project, only saying that he thought it was a win-win situation for everyone involved.
The same is true for the involvement of the US government in the power pool. As part of President Obama’s Power Africa Initiative, USAID is supporting this and other pools in Africa.
“Basically, we are providing technical assistance, but I think the two countries will find a way to work on the project, as I have witnessed good political will from the two sides,” Pamela G. Quanrud, regional energy counsellor for Africa at the US Department of State, said to Fortune.
“We don’t have any problem working with our partners, except on projects which harm Egyptians’ interests,” Mohamed Mousa (PhD), first under secretary of state for the Ministry of Electricity & Energy of Egypt, toldFortune.
The Sudanese CEO thinks, however, that Egypt, whose main source of power is fossil fuel, will benefit from the import of cheaper and cleaner power from Ethiopia.
Members of the Egyptian delegation, none of whose nominees were accepted for the secretary general position, were also unhappy about the EAPP administration structure.
“The secretary general’s position should be given to member countries in rotation, rather than the present format where the elected will stay in power for three years,” Abdel Rahim told Fortune.
Nine candidates from six member countries applied for the post of the secretary general. Two from Tanzania and one from Sudan were shortlisted by the human resource committee of the steering committee. On the final morning of the extraordinary meeting, the council of ministers approved the selection of Lebbi Changula, engineer, as the first secretary general of the EAPP.
The former strategic planning manager at the Tanzanian state electric utility told Fortune that his first duty would be to speed up the different bilateral interconnection projects ongoing in the region, urging members to put politics aside and focus on the technical issues.
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