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Revamping energy sector a sure must
2007-07-18 08:49:51
By Editor
On Monday, several Members of Parliament raised concern over what they called falling levels in the availability and supply of electricity in the country despite repeated promises by the government to solve the problem once and for all.
Two issues have come to the fore. The first is historical and it is that our power generation capacity is still horrendously low and only 13 per cent of the country`s population of 36 million have access to this celebrated source of energy.
Most of those that are lucky are urban dwellers. The sidelined rural dwellers have been made to wait for the rollout of so-called Rural Electrification Project.
The second issue, truly a controversial one for those connected to the national grid, relates to the chronically erratic nature of the power supply.
This causes customers much embarrassment partly by damaging household appliances or even leading to fires that gut whole buildings, with requisite amounts of compensations seldom available.
It is sad that even after suffering a nationwide power crisis for almost a year, we are yet to see fast-tracked efforts to develop alternative sources of energy that would complement the hydro-power stations in place.
One would have expected that after having managed to harness electricity using the Songo Songo gas and get Mtwara Region connected to reliable power, immediate steps would have been taken to link up Lindi, Kigoma and Ruvuma regions and eventually get a truly national grid.
Our power tariffs often rise simply because Tanesco seeks to compensate for the annual 10bn/- losses it incurs generating thermal power for these four regions.
It would be invoking public bitterness to relate how independent power projects have milked this country near dry just as it would be of great benefit to the nation if we developed alternative sources of power more aggressively.
Fortunately, Tanzania is richly endowed with most of what is needed to just do that: solar and wind power, lake and ocean waters, biogas, coal, natural gas and volcanic outlets, you name it.
The most one hears about things like gigantic solar power projects being undertaken anywhere relates to efforts by an NGO or some other kind of unsustainable philanthropy work.
Large-scale alternative power projects, if and when undertaken through the public-private sector model of investment, would be of massive relief to existing hydro-power generation capacity particularly during periods of prolonged drought.
This strategy would ultimately also cut the monopoly of the state-owned Tanesco`s monopoly, for long blamed for some of the power-related problems facing the country.
The final benefits are both domestic and global. All of the available alternative energy resources in Tanzania are `green` by nature, meaning that burning them to release energy would not result in greenhouse emissions and would thus help ease global warming.
We have been spending billions in implementing an array of political, social, economic and other projects.
Surely, we should not ignore power generation and distribution. It`s all a policy issue – setting our national priorities as judiciously as we can.
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