The Kenyan electric company (KENGEN) won the bid to drilling wells at the Tulu Moye Geothermal project at a cost of 50 million USD. The drilling will begin in early January for the project that is expected to end in 2021.
Following a call for tenders issued by Tulu Moye Geothermal Operations, Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) was selected to implement the first phase of the 50 MW project. On Wednesday October 23 at the Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa the CEO’s for the two parties agreed to a contract.
KENGEN, will drill 8 geothermal wells. Each well will cost over 6 million USD and Geo-scientific surveys will be conducted at the project site.
“We have the most expertise in Africa and it is really impressive to work next door in Ethiopia,” Rebecca Miano, CEO and Managing Director of KENGEN said.
The plant is being developed by Meridiam Infrastructure Africa Fund (an investment fund owned by the French company Meridiam) and the Icelandic company Reykjavik Geothermal (RG). The contract awarded to KENGEN is worth 52 USD.
For KENGEN, this is the second agreement in Ethiopia as it had already won a contract worth almost 77 USD with its partner, the Chinese company Shandong Kerui Oilfield Service Group, in April 2019, for the supply of equipment and the installation of 22 geothermal wells on the Aluto-Langano site in the Ethiopian rift where it is being developed by Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP), which is in charge of electricity production and distribution.
Tulu Moye Geothermal (TMGO), a joint venture between Meridiam and Reykjavik Geothermal (RG), is working on the first phase of a 50-megawatt geothermal power plant project in Tulu Moye, Ethiopia.
The Tulu Moye Geothermal project is led by French, US and Icelandic investors.
Back in 2018, the United States Trade and Development Agency, backed the project by granting 1.1USD to conduct a feasibility study for the first 50MW phase of the planned 520MW project. The site has been studied intensely by the Reykjavik Geothermal’s team and Ethiopian scientists.
The Tulu Moye Project, located in the Arsi Zone of Oromia Regional State, is being developed jointly by the French company Meridiam SAS, the Iceland-based Reykjavik Geothermal and TM Geothermal. Ethiopia has an estimated potential of generating 45,000MW from hydropower, solar, wind and geothermal sources.
“African countries should partners each other as we have the knowledge and expertise, the equipment to do so many projects as manifested today,” she adds.
Kenyan firm to drill Tulu Moye Geothermal project
AU program will standardize documentation of people
With the goal of digitizing civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and African Union have jointly developed a ‘digital transformation strategy’ that will be adopted by African countries assuming heads of state approve it during their January meeting.
CRVS was one of the major reasons the continent wanted to modernize the system and enhance the Continental Free Trade Agreement (CFTA).
Experts in the sector said that digitizing the CRVS is crucial to realizing the continental free trade agreement. To come up with the modernized system ECA has opened a centre of excellence at its headquarters in Addis Ababa.
Oliver Chinganya, Director of the African Statistics Centre at ECA, says “We have set up a centre of excellence of a basic digitization of economy, trade and ID. So the whole idea is to see how we can help countries harmonize their regulations and come up with the principles for digitization.”
“Because we found out in most of the countries they are doing some kind of digitization of some sort but these are fragmented and separated approaches that are not very useful. Because then the people provided them with what I call vendors, they go on for a short time and provide an activity and after some time they go away then the project dies and everything collapses,” he told Capital in relation with the 5th Conference of African Ministers responsible for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics held in Lusaka, Zambia a week ago.
He said that during this term ECA is coming up with a process of helping countries with common standards, common principles, which harmonizes the regulations but also with a system that communicates with others in an operable system since it was launched last November.
“Now we are trying to see how we can quickly operationalize this. We have not really started giving the support to countries but what we are doing now is assessment of what kind of system the countries have and on the basis of that we have been able start developing assisting countries,” Chinganya added.
He told Capital that ECA is also working with the African Union to boost the scheme jointly.
“We are also working with the African Union and developing a ‘digital transformation strategy’ that will be presented in January to head of states in the coming African Union summit in Addis Ababa for endorsement,” the Director of the African Statistics Centre explained.
So this can be owned at the country level in terms of the principles of harmonization, according to him.
Regarding the CFTA he said that countries do not have a very robust digital system in the country, it will have some problems because then they want a system where one is crossing a country into another country and they should be able to have a system that process people very quickly.
“The only way you can do it that if you have digitized system to be able to trade with another person in another country. Because if you have everything is digitized it means when you are going to the system you know the firm or company that is already having what you want in the system,” the continental organization relevant office head said.
He added that: “if don’t have that system then you cannot easily trade and this we are saying can we make sure countries have use the technology, can we leverage on the technology that is available now and benefit on the CFTA process and so forth.”
So it would be very important for countries to leverage this. But it also very clear most of the countries are using a digital economy that not completely fully embraced, so we are looking for a situation where we have a complete reference of the digital economy.
At the conference Chinganya emphasized the importance of digitalization as a facilitator of CRVS.
“We have gathered here for the 5th conference of CRVS with an expanded mandate and with the full acknowledgement that civil registration is the foundation of legal identity – a universal requirement for SDG16.9 to provide legal identity for all, including birth registration. It also needs to harness the dividends of digitalization,” he said.
The Fifth Conference of African Ministers Responsible for Civil Registration ended in Lusaka, Zambia, Friday with member states agreeing to scale-up efforts to address the huge identity gap that exists on the continent.
The ministers urged their governments to avail more financial resources to help them revamp and modernize the continent’s CRVS and ID management systems to ensure they leave no one behind.
Partners were also called on to scale-up financial assistance to the Africa Programme on Accelerated Improvement of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (APAI-CRVS) which is leading the continent’s efforts to create modern and comprehensive CRVS systems.
Sugar scarcity continues
The sugar scarcity saga shows no signs of slowing in Ethiopia. In September the country’s nine regions and two city administrations received 390,000 quintals of sugar. This is 130,000 quintals less than the previous ration.
Seven sugar factories are undergoing maintenance and there are 36,000 metric tons of sugar being imported from Algeria.
Previously each household would receive 5 kilos of sugar per month from the consumer association but now that has been reduced to two kilos.
A kilo of sugar goes for between 20 birr and 30 birr in shops but is seldom available. Quotas for almost every area were down in September. In quintals this is a list of what each area received previously and what they received last month.
Addis Ababa 120,000 to 46,000, Dire Dawa 11,860 to 2,000, Oromia 152,000 to 25,000, Amhara 109,000 to 18,000, Tigray 47,000 to 9,000, SNNPR 69,000 to 17,400. Afrar and Harare below 2,000 quintals, from an undisclosed previous amount but reports say it is around half as much.
Somali 24,152, Benishangul-Gumuz 4,500, Gambela 8,000. These were unchanged from previous amounts but that is because they did not receive their previous supply due to technical issues.
Solomon Bekle, Commodity exchange head at the Addis Ababa Trade Bureau told Capital that the supply cut will clearly disturb the market.
“As far as we know, the consumer association plans 50 percent supply cuts to households and we are controlling the market to prevent price gouging. I think the problem will be solved when the imported sugar arrives and factories restart operations.”
The Sugar Corporation expects the product to reach Ethiopia by November.
