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Gemcorp Capital has signed an agreement with the Ministry of Energy and Water which could lead to excess power generated in Angola being exported to Namibia and the Southern African Power Pool (Sapp).

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El Sisi have pledged to renew efforts to resolve their dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd) during a meeting in Cairo. The two leaders said they would try to reach an agreement on the dam’s filling and operating procedures within four months.

Ethiopia’s ‘unilateral action’ in starting limited power generation at the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd) violates its diplomatic obligations, Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry told the Council of the League of Arab States on 9 March.

Société Nationale d’Electricité (Snel) says the Inga I and II hydropower plants could be restored to 90% capacity by year-end following turbine rehabilitation work. The 351MW capacity of Inga I was fully restored in mid-November following repairs to the G16 turbine which broke down in early October, cutting supply to Matadi, Boma, Muanda and Tshela in Kongo Central province. News reports quoted the plant’s interim manager, Serge Mbiyavanga, as saying a short-circuit had damaged the 58.5MW turbine.

The DRC government has decided to recruit a new private-sector partner to develop a smaller, 4,800MW version of the Inga 3 hydro project on the Congo River. The decision is part of a new roadmap for the project discussed at a two-day workshop on the development of Inga 3 held in Abidjan on 13-14 January, with the African Development Bank (AfDB) and other financial partners. Discussions included a review of the project’s status, demand projections and the planned public-private partnership to develop it.

A 15 January cabinet meeting approved a draft decree on the status of the Agence pour le Développement et la Promotion du Projet Grand Inga (ADPI-RDC). The draft decree relates to the status, organisation and operation of the agency that was created in October 2015 to oversee the Grand Inga project. The 2015 decree describes ADPI-RDC as a special body within the Office of the President, and stipulates that ADPI-RDC determines the framework of the project, its launch, oversight measures, the selection of private partners and the award of concessions.

A month after inviting the Spanish and Chinese consortia competing to build the 4,800MW Inga 3 hydropower dam on the Congo River to merge their offers into a single bid, the head of the Agency for the Development and Promotion of Grand Inga (ADPI), Bruno Kapandji Kalala, has said the project’s start date has been postponed by four years to 2024 or 2025. “We are working for this timing (in 2024 or 2025) now that the potential developer has been identified,” he told Reuters on 3 July.

Ambiguous signals from South Africa are adding to concerns that, for all the political support and its central position in the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (Pida), the Grand Inga project’s anchor client is less than certain the scheme will go ahead in its current configuration. Critics point to daunting downside risks, including heavy costs, the supply-side impact of rival schemes (including mega-projects led by the new-build nuclear programme and plans to pipe more gas from Mozambique) and heightened perceptions of political risk in the run-up to presidential elections in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which are scheduled for November.

Officials in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are making bullish noises about the much-anticipated Inga 3 hydroelectric power project, with the bidding whittled down to two consortia, which officials say are expected to present their final offers by 31 July, for contracts to be signed by year-end. Veteran energy official Bruno Kapandji Kalala – appointed by President Joseph Kabila Kabange to head the Agence pour le Développement et la Promotion du Projet Grand Inga (ADPI-RDC), the unit within the president’s office charged with delivering the Grand Inga project – has set out a roadmap for the project’s implementation and revealed changes to the bidding consortia.

The Senegal River Basin Development Organisation (OMVS) signed a contract with Sinohydro on 26 February to develop the 294MW Koukoutamba hydroelectric project in northern Guinea. Sinohydro will build the $812m project, located in the department of Tougué, in the Labé region, on the Bafing River about 7.5km upstream of its confluence with the Senegal River, under an engineering, procurement and construction contract financed by the Export-Import Bank of China. Construction is expected to begin before the end of H1 2019, and take four years, according to project manager Bouya Condé.

Mauritius-based Tembo Power has outlined plans for the construction of five hydropower plants in the Lubudi area of Lualaba province with a combined generation capacity of over 70MW. The project, which would cost an estimated $300m, aims to improve power supply to miners in the Copperbelt region. Tembo DRC chief operating officer John Nsana Kanyoni presented feasibility studies for the project to a workshop in Kinshasa on 28 June. The hydrological, geotechnical and environmental studies were carried out by Aurecon, which identified five sites along the Kalule Sud River, a tributary of the Lualaba River.

The draft Kenya Energy White Paper, published in July, set out an overarching approach to the country’s energy sector. The white paper was not designed as a formal policy document but rather one that proposed “the type of policies that will be needed to achieve the country’s energy objectives”.

According to cabinet secretary for energy Davis Chirchir, the Kenyan government’s moratorium on IPPs is ‘unsustainable’, amid the risk of future loadshedding due to shortage of supply, while other advances are in the pipeline, including wheeling tariffs and the supply of power through embedded networks, writes Neville Otuki in Nairobi.

It is unlikely electric cars will come to dominate African roads for decades, but in the likes of Kenya and Benin battery-powered buses, motorbikes and industrial vehicles could have a radical impact on urban environments and commercial operations. Investors are lining up to support e-mobility projects in the most attractive markets, but in many jurisdictions the lack of capital, infrastructure and policy support and the high cost of vehicles are holding back what could be a revolution, write Tonderayi Mukeredzi and Jon Marks.

State-owned Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) is seeking a consultant to conduct a feasibility study on a proposed 40MW floating solar PV plant on the Kamburu hydroelectric power (HEP) plant reservoir.