Kenya will start supplying power to Rwanda in the next three months. According to Kenya Power officials, they will start selling 30MW of electricity to Rwanda in the next three months.

The country has bagged a $50 million syndicated loan from the African Development Bank (AfDB) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to finance the project, they said.

Confirming the development, Jean Bosco Mugiraneza, the Rwanda Energy Group chief, told The New Times yesterday that works on the power transmission line for the electricity from Kenya will be completed in September.

"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.

In December last year, government sealed a five-year contract with Kenya through the country’s power distributor. According to the deal, Rwanda will pay US 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.

Manufacturers have for long decried low power supply, saying power cuts destroy their equipment and increase operational costs. This forced the infrastructure ministry to recently order the power distributor to increase supply to industrial electricity users from six to nine hours to ease the problem.

Meanwhile, plans for the construction of a sh5.3 billion power transmission line between Kenya and Tanzania have been unveiled. The 93-kilometre line will enable Kenya to sell excess electricity to Tanzania and, works will start in January and end in December 2017, according the country’s energy principal secretary Joseph Njoroge.

The project completion will coincide with the planned generation of additional 5,000MW of electricity to the grid.

"The line will facilitate power exchange at very competitive rates,” Njoroge said on Tuesday at the project launch in Nairobi.

business@newtimes.co.rw