VICTORIA FALLS, Feb. 24 (NewsDay Live) – Africa has materially under-invested in electricity transmission, stalling regional integration and worsening power shortages, a local independent power producer executive said on Monday.
Victor Utenzi, chief executive officer of Centragrid, said investment has favoured generation projects because they are more visible and politically attractive.“It’s easy to invest in generation — you can cut ribbons,” Utenzi said. “Generation is the engine. Transmission is the highway. We are building engines but not putting money into the highway.”
Africa requires an estimated US$80 billion to US$100 billion in power sector investment through 2040, he said, but less than 10% has gone into transmission.
“For a long time, transmission was not viewed as an investable asset. Money flows into generation easily,” he said.
Transmission has largely been treated as a government function financed by donors, with few commercial models to attract private capital, Utenzi added.
He cited the long-delayed Zizabona interconnector linking Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia, signed in 2007, as an example of stalled progress despite years of preparatory work.
Keep Reading
- Open letter to President Mnangagwa
- Feature: ‘It’s worse right now than under Mugabe’: Sikhala pays the price of opposition in solitary cell
- Masvingo turns down fire tender deal
- Human-wildlife conflict drive African wild dogs to extinction
“The issue is not the need for the project. It’s about bankable commercial arrangements — where is the generation coming from and who are the customers?” he said.
Utenzi also pointed to the Zambia-Tanzania-Kenya interconnector, conceived in the early 2000s to move surplus southern African power northwards, saying market shifts now mean East Africa holds excess capacity that could have been shared.
Angola, a member of the Southern African Power Pool, remains electrically disconnected from much of the region despite about 2,000 megawatts of developed capacity awaiting transmission links.
“There are consequences of under-investing in transmission. Markets become fractured,” Utenzi said.
He said workable models exist, citing the Motraco transmission project in Mozambique and emerging independent transmission initiatives in South Africa’s renewable energy zones.“The constraints are structural more than financial,” Utenzi said. “We have materially under-invested in transmission, and we need to fix the commercial frameworks.”