Kinshasa, Congo --
The Democratic Republic of Congo may provide 2,500 megawatts of
power to South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia under a revised plan to
build the Inga III hydropower plant, a project official said.
The government will host a meeting next month to
discuss three bids from companies including Sinohydro Corp. of China and
Posco of Korea to build the 4,000-megawatt facility, said Vika di
Panzu, a member of Congo’s Inga III Steering Committee. The plant will
take six years to build and cost more than $9 billion, he said in an
interview yesterday at the iPAD mining and infrastructure conference in
Congo’s capital, Kinshasa.
The Central African nation may finance the project
with help from multilateral donors including the World Bank and the
African Development Bank, and power-purchasing agreements from metal
companies, with construction beginning by 2016, di Panzu said. Two
previous plans to finance Inga III failed in the past decade, delaying
its construction, he said.
BHP Billiton Ltd., the world’s biggest mining company,
in February abandoned a plan to build an aluminum smelter in Congo to
be powered by the plant. The BHP deal supplanted an earlier plan with
Western Power Corridor, a venture involving five southern African
countries, to build a plant that was intended to fill a regional energy
shortfall. South Africa had power outages in 2008 that shut most of its
mines and smelters.
Congo will begin considering final feasibility studies
from three groups of companies next month, di Panzu said, including one
from China Three Gorges Corp. and Sinohydro. Two Korean companies,
Posco and Daewoo Corp. have partnered with Canada’s SNC-Lavalin Group
Inc. for a second bid. Actividades de Construccion y Servicios SA, based
in Madrid, and Spain’s Eurofinsa Group have submitted a third bid.
Power Lines
Construction of the plant will cost $6 billion, di
Panzu said, while the power lines stretching from Inga to Kolwezi in
Congo’s southeastern Katanga province and on to Witkop, South Africa,
about 3,600 kilometers (2,237 miles) away, will cost more than $3
billion. Mining companies in Katanga will receive 1,500 megawatts of
power from the deal, he said.
Congo and South Africa are also discussing a treaty for the implementation of a plan to build the world’s largest hydropower plant,
the 40,000 megawatt Grand Inga complex, after the two countries signed a
memorandum of understanding last November. Congo’s parliament is
considering a bill to liberalize the electricity industry in the
country, di Panzu said.
Copyright 2012 Bloomberg
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/10/congos-9-billion-hydropower-plant-may-export-power-to-s-africa
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