RWANDA TO GENERATE ELECTRICITY FROM PEAT

Cement is packed at the Cimerwa plant in Rusizi District, Western Province. PHOTO | CYRIL NDEGEYA 

By KABONA ESIARA

Rwanda will have 201MW installed electricity capacity after the 15MW from peat is added to the national grid next month. The current national demand for electricity is 105MW.

The peat electricity plant at Gishoma is fully financed by the government at over $35 million but the cost, according to analysts could have shot up due to the delayed completion of the project.

This year also, Rwanda successfully added 25MW of electricity generated from methane gas on the Lake Kivu.

The Gishoma peat plant is currently generating 10MW, which are supplied directly to Cimerwa, Rwanda’s cement maker that has been relying on expensive fuel oil to run the plant keeping locally produced cement expensive.

“We are still constructing transmission lines and power stations which will be complete by August. All the generators will be switched on for the plant to operate at the 15MW installed capacity,” said Emmanuel Kamanzi managing director at Energy Development Corporation Ltd.

Stable power supply

Though the cement plant can produce 600,000 metric tonnes a year, it has not reached that level of production yet. This explains the heavy presence of regional cement brands on the Rwandan market. But with stable power supply, officials in the cement factory say Cimerwa is now set to operate at its full installed capacity. The type of production needed for both the local and regional market.

“Operations 24 hours a day need a stable power supply which the peat plant will help address,” said Busi Lagodi, the chief executive of Cimerwa, though she is not sure the power tariff she has been buying power at will reduce.

Rwanda targets to generate 200MW of electricity from peat buoyed by the big deposit of peat bogs in the country. The large deposits have attracted Turkish firm Hakan to design, build, finance, own and operate an 80-megawatt peat power plant. “The Hakan power is expected to be added on the national grid after three years, said Kamanzi.

The challenge is that, the pilot peat plant at Gishoma will have to close as the peat deposits will be depleted after five years. The government was forced to locate the plant in this area as part of the incentive promised to the Johannesburg Security Exchange-listed Pretoria Portland Cement to invest in Rwanda cement manufacturing. PPC has a 51 per cent stake in Cimerwa.

The Rwanda Peat Master Plan prepared by EKONO indicated that Rwanda has reserves of 155 million tonnes of dry peat spread over about 50,000 hectares.
CREDIT: NATION MEDIA