Rwanda to buy power from Kenya

Kenya will sell its surplus electricity to Rwanda. Kenya Power said it would start selling 30MW of electricity to Rwanda in the next three months. Rwanda has bagged a $50 million syndicated loan from the African Development Bank (AfDB) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to finance the project.

Jean Bosco Mugiraneza, the Rwanda Energy Group Chief, said that works on the power transmission line for the electricity from Kenya will be completed this month. “We are also pushing the company working on the power substation at Nsango to speed up activities so that we are ready to start importing power by the end of the year,” he said.

Even as the deal to import power from Kenya begins to take shape, Rwanda announced that the first gas samples on the KivuWatt methane to power the project have been extracted and were successfully tested signalling a major breakthrough for the multi-million dollar venture whose creation has lasted seven years.

Jarmo Gummerus, the country director of ContourGlobal, the American energy firm with a 25-year deal to produce 100MW from the methane-rich Lake Kivu, has confirmed the development saying it’s the first step before fully fledged production.

This is the project’s first phase and it’s expected to add at least 25MW to the national grid before the end of next month. In December last year, Rwanda sealed a five-year contract with Kenya through the country’s power distributor. According to the deal, Rwanda will pay $14 cents (Rwf50) per kilowatt of power imported.

The contract will be reviewed after every two years. Rwanda also plans to import 400MW of power from Ethiopia by 2018, a move aimed at increasing electricity supply in the country, especially for industrial use.

Rwanda currently has an installed power generation capacity of 161.2MW.
The country hopes to increase this to 563MW of power by 2018 to improve access to electricity, especially in the rural areas.