By:Nghiinomenwa-vali Erastus
The Southern Africa Power Pool (SAPP) has indicated that the market for electricity generation is massive as the 12 member countries have over 9,8 Gigawatts of electricity needs.
Thus, many Namibian power producers are opting to fill this regional gap as it attracts better prices compared to the domestic market.
The SAPP administration revealed the power gap during its regional conference in Windhoek early this week.
The country with the largest power deficit is South Africa, with 9,071MW of electricity shortage, accounting for 92% of Southern Africa’s deficit.
Despite South Africa’s huge power deficit, Namibia’s power supplier will struggle to export to the neighbour countries as its transmission is ever congested, and at many occasions not available.
Namibia and South Africa are connected via a 400 KV transmission line. However, the Northern Cape transmission seems to be ever-congested, according to the insights from the conference.
The second country with a big deficit is the richest in resources, being the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with a power deficit of 2,426MW.
Namibia, despite its abundant renewable energy sources and a gas reserve on the ocean floor, has the third-highest deficit standing at 395MW.
The 12 member countries of SAPP have a peak energy demand of 55,644MW, as it has only an operating capacity of 45,865 MW.
The member countries have installed a generation capacity – 82GW.
The first category that participates on the SAPP board are the national power utilities. Others are operating members – meant for members whose operations have a significantly high impact on the SAPP grid (cut-off being 300 MW capacity).
The third category are market participants whose main objective is to trade on the SAPP markets (cut-off being 5 MW capacity). This is the category where eligible Independent Power Producers (IPPs) can participate.
The last category are Conditional Membership for Market Participants introduced this yearfor power developers who intend to construct power plants for trading on the SAPP markets.
The category is introduced to be able to provide comfort to IPP financiers before the plants are constructed.
The Conditional Membership for Market Participants will be for five years, following which the entity must meet the requirements for membership
Currently, the SAPP has 3 Independent Power producers participating on the board from Zambia and Zimbabwe.
So far nine countries are currently interconnected at the transmission level of the SAPP grid. However, Tanzania, Malawi and Angola are not connected, thus they are unable totrade.
Two of the non-connected countries are part of the threeSouthern African member countries that have surplus generation.
Angola is topping with 2,144 MW of excess power, while Tanzania has 129 MW of excess power that can be deployed through the SAPPif they were connected to the regional grid.
The update from the SAPP administration is that these countries are being connected to the grid through various projects.
The benefits of trading on the SAPP are that the region will have a diverse generation mix; and countries will be able to tap on other energy utilities that have excess generation capacities, to reduce their deficit. Email: erastus@thevillager.com.na