Mpanda Nkuwa hydro dam approved in 2007

Mozambique’s huge new Mpanda Nkuwa hydroelectric dam is to take at least a decade to be built and start operating, the country’s deputy minister for energy and mineral resources, Augusto de Sousa, told Lusa in an interview.

“Quite frankly, Mpanda Nkuwan will go on until 2028 or 2029,” he said. “Before that it isn’t going to happen.”De Sousa’s comments came after Mozambique’s president, Filipe Nyusi, revealed in August that two state enterprises, Electricidade de Moçambique (EDM) and Hidroeléctrica de Cahora Bassa (HCB), were in charge of reviving the dam project.The minister also said that HCB “could go to the market and obtain financing to implement the project” but that there was still work to carry out beforehand.He said the country was studying “all past documentation” to verify that there is nothing “that penalises the government” since the construction plan was approved in September 2007. “We are going through all the past documentation,” he said, verifying that “there is nothing that penalises the government”, since the construction plan was approved in September 2007 and has passed through the hands of several partnerships from then, without being implemented.After that, there are several other deadlines to take into account, the deputy minister said: five years to build the dam, the power plant, two years for structuring the project (which includes transport lines or energy sales agreements), plus a few more to solve any pending issues.Put together, these will take the implementation schedule all the way to 2028 or 2029.

“I do not see [the project] happening sooner than that,” de Sousa said. Indeed, the dam will be ready just as Mozambique begins extracting natural gas from the large offshore reserves in the north of the country, part of which will be used to produce electricity. But even so, De Sousa says, the construction of Mpanda Nkuwa is justified.The Electricity Infrastructure Development Master Plan foresees electricity demand increasing eight-fold over the next 25 years to 8,000 megawatts. More than half that will be produced from natural gas, but the dam will help “respond to demand” and will contribute to “the diversification of energy sources.”

“Until five years ago, Mozambique was 100% hydro” with respect to electricity sourcing. Today it has 30% natural gas (from the Sasol project in Inhambane) and 70% hydro, “a large part of which originates from the Cahora Bassa dam”.

Limitations on energy production at Cahora Bassa due to drought last year were a warning sign of the need to diversify the range of energy sources, the deputy minister concluded.