Want to find out where many members of Uganda’s chattering class on social media live? Camp on the timeline of the power distributor UEDCL any day and, soon enough, you will see the groans of despair over power surges destroying equipment, low voltage supply unable to run stuff, or just no power at all.
This is an old problem — before UEDCL, it was Umeme, the listed concessionaire, that Ugandans loved to hate — but an evolving one. If your lights went out 15 years ago, it was probably because of load shedding or power rationing. Today, it is likely to be down to a creaky last-mile distribution network, or an errant driver wrapping their car around an electricity pole and bringing down the line.
This is because we have, in the space of those 15 years, gone from an electricity deficit to a surplus after the commissioning of the 183-megawatt Isimba dam and the 600MW Karuma.
There is no justification for a country with a surplus of electricity to have routine power outages. In its ‘ode to joy’ note to shareholders as it rode off into the sunset, Umeme noted that power losses — in transmission and unpaid bills — had halved during its concession to around 16 percent. Significant, but still much higher than the industry average of 10 percent.
Given that most customers are now on pre-paid electricity metres, this persistently high loss factor suggests under-investment in the last-mile power grid under Umeme, which has now carried over into the new publicly owned distributor.
This is one of at least three power problems we must confront if we want to build a Uganda that works. Wasted electricity keeps the bills high for everyone because the power generated must be paid for, whether it is used or not. Irregular power also stymies economic growth, especially in small businesses, and even in larger ones, which must carry the additional expense of auxiliary power systems. To avoid wasting the current electricity surplus, we must quickly and rapidly upgrade the last-mile distribution network.
The second problem is the misalignment between where the power is generated and where it is used. Building industrial parks and heavy usage off takers nearer to the power generation sites would reduce the financial and technical cost of transmission. It will also create downstream economic opportunities and demand to end the current farce of power lines running above mud-and-wattle houses.
You need to manufacture stuff in Jinja and Karuma, then figure out a way to expand solar for the mostly domestic users upcountry. Figuring out how to assemble and then manufacture solar equipment locally will reduce the cost and accelerate electrification, with the bonus of saving what’s left of our trees (another topic, another day).
Our bigger problem with power, however, circles back to how much of it is available. On current projections, demand will match available supply in under a decade — shorter if extra heavy-duty industries, whose number has stagnated since before Covid, increase, including the entry of power-hungry data centres, or if rising incomes grow demand exponentially.
The problem is that it takes, on average, at least a decade to build a major power dam in Uganda, and they always come in way above budget, with technical snafus. Bujagali is a good example. First approved in 1994, it was not commissioned until 2012, by which time the cost had more than doubled to more than a billion dollars.
Opaque procurement processes lead to delays as rival bidders wrangle. It also leads to corners being cut (for example, the road over Isimba Dam that was conveniently ‘forgotten’) as adjustments are made to accommodate rent bills. They also lead to above-market prices.
For instance, the current price tag on the proposed 840MW Ayago hydropower project — which is already years behind schedule — is, according to one estimate, U$5 billion. This is roughly the same cost as Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam, which produces more than 5,000MW.
Even if the price tag drops, it will have to do so significantly to get back within the million-dollar-per-megawatt range that would make the power produced relatively cheap, and Ugandan producers using it competitive within the region and beyond.
So, as annoying as flickering lights are, we have a looming problem of powering Uganda’s economic growth by building bigger dams faster and better. There can be no economic growth, jobs and poverty reduction without cheap and reliable power. Of course, we have other problems with other forms of power, but electricity is one we do not have to leave for God to solve.