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Tanzania, Kenya to start cross-border electricity trade on Wednesday
Workers walk past electricity power lines at the Olkaria II Geothermal power plant near Naivasha. Kenya and Tanzania will soon start cross-border trade in electricity.
What you need to know:
- The power utilities of the two countries have been doing test runs on the $309.26 million (Sh39.97 billion) electricity transmission line in the last few months in readiness for its switch-on.
Tanzania and Kenya will start cross-border trade in electricity between themselves on Wednesday next week, a top official said, boosting efforts to curb power rationing and blackout in the two countries.
This will make Tanzania the third country after Ethiopia and Uganda to trade electricity with Kenya.
Dr John Mativo, the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company (Ketraco) managing director, told the Business Daily on Friday that the line connecting the two countries will go live on December 11, 2024.
The power utilities of the two countries have been doing test runs on the $309.26 million (Sh39.97 billion) electricity transmission line in the last few months in readiness for its switch-on.
The switch-on of the line will be a game changer for both countries as it will enable them to sell their excess electricity and buy from the other in case of a generation shortfall.
This would be particularly beneficial for Kenya, which is currently struggling to generate enough electricity to meet demand during peak hours, leading to power rationing.
The activation of the line comes two months after Kenya Power signed a power exchange agreement with the Tanzania Electric Supply Company Limited (Tanesco). Tanesco is the sole power distributor in Tanzania.
“Both the National Control Centres in Kenya and Tanzania have allowed Ketraco, Kenya Power, and Tanesco to energise the line on Wednesday, December 11, 2024. We pray (that) nothing changes,” said Dr Mativo.
Further, the Kenya-Tanzania interconnector will be connected to the Ethiopia-Kenya transmission system through the Isinya-Suswa 400kV line. The line is part of the Eastern Africa Electricity Highway with a transfer capacity of 2,000 megawatts (MW).
The Kenya-Tanzania interconnector is a key link not only between the two countries but also links Ethiopia and Tanzania. Ethiopia is already planning to export 100MW to Tanzania via Kenya.
Tanzania has significantly boosted its local generation capacity with the construction of the 2,115MW Julius Nyerere Hydropower Plant. Tanzania recently announced that the plant is already supplying 940MW to its grid, helping it retire some of its expensive gas-fired power plants.
The Kenya-Tanzania line is also a key pillar of the Eastern Africa Power Pool (EAPP), which is a group of 13 countries from the region that want to trade electricity with each other.
Kenya started electricity imports from Ethiopia in December 2022 following the signing of a PPA between their two utilities in July of the same year. However, full commercial operations of the PPA between Kenya Power and Ethiopian Electric Power started a year later in December 2023.
Kenya also imports electricity from Uganda. Official data shows that power imports from Uganda and Ethiopia surged 76.7 percent in the nine months to September as Kenya raced to avoid electricity rationing and curb blackouts.
Kenya imported a record 1,137.84 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) or units from Uganda and Tanzania during the nine-month period. This marked a significant jump from 643.91 million units that Kenya imported from the two countries during the same period last year, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.
This helped Kenya to escape widespread power rationing as a result of insufficient local generation, which declined by 0.6 percent to 9,339.5 million units during the period, down from 9,399.54 million units during the same period last year.
