Evacuating power. Whereas transmission evacuation lines carry high voltage power, distribution lines cannot, which not only results in energy losses but also limited evacuation of power.
The frustration in Gulu city over electricity outages is written all over the residents’ faces.
“It flickers like a disco light,” a resident describes the state of power outages in Gulu. Businesses, on the other hand, have lost a lot of money by hiring power generators.
Cynibel, a retail supermarket chain store, says they can go without power for three days, which translates to fuel costs for the business incurred through using generators.
Mr Robert Otim, founder of Opit investments, a milling industry is eying the nascent South Sudan market as well as the local community but the challenge of limited capacity of the transformer dedicated to the industry will not let him realise the demand.
Plagued by bush burning, vandalism, old and dilapidated lines, power outages in Gulu keep recurring. For years, the northern town has decried power outages and a solution has been promised.
The ray of hope faded for some, but a drowning man will clutch at a straw. Commissioned at the end of 2019, the 42 Megawatt (MW) Acwa dam was expected to be the saving grace.
Issues of power outages were to be a thing of the past, different stakeholders in the power sector promised.
Flash-forward to the tail end of 2020, Gulu, now with city status, still sings the power outages chorus.
What happened to Acwa?
A few months left to commissioning of the dam, there was no evacuation line in site. Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Limited (UETCL), the government company in charge of evacuating high voltage power from dams in Uganda and later sells to power distributors had at the time, only just acquired the engineering, procurement and construction contractor of a 132 kilovott(Kv) power evacuation line.Since the country had run out of time and heightened the risk of incurring capacity payments for the power the dam would have potentially been producing, an interim solution was created.Uganda Electricity Distribution Company Limited (UEDCL), with Shs30b from government, built a 33kv distribution evacuation line that would supply only 12MW of the 42MW installed capacity of the dam. Temporary solution This solution was short-lived.A recent trip to the northern region revealed that the dam even with the interim solution was not producing power.According to Mr Jonan Kiiza, the spokesperson of UEDCL, the power line distributed power for […]