South to East: Power Lessons for Kenya from Madiba Land

Sometime in 2015, I visited Eskom, South Africa’s national electricity public utility, which was established in 1923. Put in a different way, it means that today, the global energy giant has been around for a century. It has run a full cycle in the energy business, making it fertile ground for knowledge harvesting in Africa.

But let us not get ahead of ourselves. First, let us look at the current public perception. Ask anyone today about Eskom and more so those of us in the energy circles and we will have millions of things to say about the state of energy in SA, only that none of it will be positive.

Perceptions

“South Africa is only known for load-shedding. They are not able to meet the country’s energy demand,” an informed one would say.

“Eskom is riddled with graft and state capture and that is why the utility has poor customer service,” such will be yet another informed contribution.

“If you visit South Africa, you will see how that country is struggling to supply power to its people. South Africa is always in total darkness,” and so on and so forth.

As the country welcomes the winter season, news media is rife with warnings of consumers staring at up to ten hours a day without power in what analysts have described as South Africa’s worst-ever power crisis.

Power Cuts

Mr. Segomoco Scheppers, Managing Director of Eskom’s Transmission Division says the onset of winter from June 2023 will lead to stage eight power cuts, translating to about 8,000MW being shed from the national grid in a country that bad as things may seem, has never gone beyond stage six.

However, should you be as lucky as I was to visit this great country, the African nation that gave us the global icon Nelson Mandela, better known by his countrymen as Tata Madiba, the home of Desmond Tutu, Steve Biko, and yes, Elon Musk, your world view will change completely.

Sandton alone, which would be an equivalent of Upper Hill in Nairobi, would easily be big enough to silence any naysayers about South Africa. And yet, not even the whole of Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu combined would match Sandton when it comes to economic and public infrastructure muscle.

The story of South Africa is like that of a wealthy neighbor with a posh 15-bedroom home, straddled with high perimeter fortifications and razor-sharp electric wires strung all through the walls. “There is one problem, however, the electric wires are a bit rusted,” says the next-door neighbour whose live fence has been eaten dry by his emaciated cows.?

Staying with the animal world analogy, South Africa’s situation is a classic example of the chicken-and-eggs dilemma. Or rather, between growth in demand for power and growth in installed capacity, what should come first?

Energy Giant

Today, South Africa has a total generation capacity of about 60,000MW with its Eskom which is the largest producer of electricity in Africa and among the largest in the world, netting a capacity of about 46,466MW. When it comes to power muscle, South Africa is among the top ten in the world in both energy generation and sales.

How does this compare to Kenya, one might ask? Here are comparative facts and figures; Kenya today does about 3,200MW of grid-scale generation capacity.?Kenya has about 52 million people whereas South Africa has about 59 million. From this alone, we can do some simple mathematics.

If SA, with its 59 million population is struggling to meet demand with a capacity of 60,000MW, what capacity would Kenya need to have if she was at the same level of industrialization? The magic figure is 53,898MW. This translates to a gap of well over 50,000MW, more than five times the total potential of geothermal energy in the Great Rift Valley.

Similarly, Kenya’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is USD.110 billion compared to South Africa’s USD.420. If the population of the two countries as mentioned above is anything to go by, it goes without saying that Kenya, as East Africa’s largest economy, can match its South African counterpart in a few years to come.

When that time comes, 3,000MW or even 5,000MW will not be sufficient. Assuming Kenya grows to even half of South Africa’s economy, we will need over 30,000MW. After getting 10GW from geothermal, say 5GW from hydro, and another 5GW from both wind and solar, where will the rest come from?

Active Industries

As we speak, in South Africa, more than 50% of the installed capacity is heavily consumed by the country’s active industries, with another 18% going to public services, leaving only 23% to residential consumers. This trend may explain why Kenya’s electricity access rate which grew rapidly from about 23% to 78% in the last few years has not made any noticeable jump in demand for electricity. South Africa's access rate is at about 86%.

What pushes the big dials in energy consumption is heavy manufacturing and growth in the industrial sector. This is the future for Kenya as evidenced by the increased interest in industrial parks and growth in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs).

If there was a time that such growth was going to happen in Kenya, then it would have been during the Mwai Kibaki administration, between 2002 and 2013. If that will go down as a missed opportunity, then the current Kenya Kwanza administration under President William Ruto, which came in largely on an economic growth platform may just be the answer we have been looking for.

Here is the catch. It is not a matter of if, but when it happens. One way or another, Kenya is going to industrialize in response to the growing needs and demands of its population which as we saw is now going neck-to-neck with South Africa. The people have growing needs and in time, the economy will have to respond positively.

When that time comes, we will need a huge reserve of energy sources to power the new growth frontier and put Kenya in her rightful place with other mega-energy-producing giants. The growth opportunity is immense, pouring beyond the Kenyan borders in the same fashion as South Africa.

Power Pools

Eskom for instance supplies power not only to South Africans but also to countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) like Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe through a robust power pool that will soon see a good percentage of the African continent interconnected, making each nation a net importer/exporter of electricity.

The trend is not any different in the east under the Eastern Africa Power Pool (EAPP) which has about 13 member countries including those in East Africa, the Horn of Africa, and others far up in the North like Egypt.

The big question is, therefore, are we ready for this rapid growth? Ready or not, it is here with us and the least we can do is take notes from the big brother, South Africa.

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