Prime
New substations to cut Kampala’s power outages
What you need to know:
Government through the Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Limited will construct new 220 kilovolt substations to upgrade from the present 132kV to boost power supply in Kampala
Industries, roads, offices are all mushrooming from different corners of Kampala city. These developments create growing demand for electricity in Kampala Metropolitan Area which contributes about 70 per cent of Uganda’s national demand currently at about 653 megawatts at peak. This demand is expected to grow to 987MW by 2030.
However, there is need for the transmission infrastructure used to sell power to electricity distributor, Umeme to meet the augmenting demand.
Government last year signed a $125m (Shs461b) loan from Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to implement the Kampala Metropolitan transmission system improvement project.
Government through the Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Limited will construct new 220 kilovolt substations to upgrade from the present 132kV.
According to UETCL, there is urgent need to avoid severe capacity deficit in Kampala.
“Currently, the installed primary substation capacity of Kampala metropolitan area is 460MVA, hence the need to urgently reinforce the metropolitan transmission grid in order to avoid a severe capacity deficit,” Ms Pamela Byoruganda, principal public relations manager UETCL, says.
She also emphasised that the project aims to strengthen reliability and security of power supply.
For this to be realised, UETCL will increase the primary substation capacity of the area by an additional 890MVA and enhance the capacity of transmission lines in the area.
The transmission company will, for instance, upgrade Mutundwe substation, renovate and improve the capacity of Kawaala substation.
To ensure emergency response geared at power supply security, UETCL, Ms Byoruganda says, will procure a mobile substation unit.
According to Ms Byoruganda, the mobile substation will increase the emergency response time of UETCL in case of large substation failures involving the loss of transformers.
Currently, the project has acquired a consultant to handle the resettlement action plan which is funded by government to a tune of $13.5m (Shs50b).
Ms Byoruganda says this project will focus on upgrading.
“We are compensating few people because we already have the right of way since we are using the old line but changing conductors. The project should be completed by 2022 but they have a liability period of two years,” she says.
The project is expected to create sufficient supply to industries which will in turn boost productivity and lower the cost of production, culminating into lower cost of products.
Emergency response
Uganda has faced outages due to collapse of power transmission and generation infrastructure.
