Sudan’s plans to provide power to 90% of people
KHARTOUM, June 09, 2004 (LiquidAfrica) — Sudan’s plans to provide power to 90 percent of people across Africa’s biggest country are on track and the government has already secured most of the $3 billion cost, the minister in charge said on Tuesday.
Some parts of the arid country have virtually no roads, public services or power, but a landmark deal last month paving the way to end more than two decades of war with southern rebels has sparked new hopes for an end to rumbling regional conflicts and for economic development that could follow.
Electricity Minister Ali Tamim Fartak said during a seminar on power generation in Uganda that just 30 percent of Sudanese had access to electric power at the moment.
“In the next five years we are hopefully going to cover 90 percent of the people in the Sudan with electricity,” he said.
He said the Khartoum government had secured two thirds of the projected $3 billion needed to fund the project through a combination of its own resources and soft loans from Arab and Gulf countries, India, China and South Korea.
Seventy percent of total funding would come from abroad to fund a project that hinges on expanding Sudan’s hydroelectric programme. The electrification project is part of a 25-year plan drawn up by the government last year.
“In the Sudan, fortunately, we have the longest river on earth – the Nile,” Fartak told the seminar during the annual summit of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), Africa’s biggest trade bloc.
“According to experts we can produce 14,000 megawatts of power from that river within the Sudan, but now we only have one tenth of that,” he said.
Fartak said four hydro projects were currently being developed and due to add 4,000 MW to the country’s generating capacity in the next five years.
“Now 40 percent of production of electricity in Sudan is from oil and the other 60 percent is from hydro. But we prefer to use hydro because we want to export our oil.”
Sudan has raised its oil output above 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) and is earning more than $3 billion a year at current high prices.
Fartak said solar power would be used in some areas considered too remote and isolated to be covered by the national power grid.