We hydropower geeks call Inga (which could supply as much as 45GW to Africa - that's more than South Africa's entire installed capacity) a hydropower engineer's wet dream. Just saying. It's been studied to death for over half a century, and every engineering firm with bravado wants a piece of the work that would result if the project was financed.
I've been involved in a number of initiatives around getting Inga going, including an international roundtable convened by the African Development Bank, and the key problem is bankability of the project in a country which is so unstable. To be bankable, an infrastructure project needs to have creditworthy offtakers (customers). The main customers for this project would be SNEL (DRC's utility) and other regional electric utilities, all of which are in precarious financial situations, so not considered creditworthy.
That now includes Eskom, although in the 1990s Eskom was much stronger financially.
It's unfortunately too difficult for financiers in the current financial world to structure a project which would supply multiple private sector clients (who couldn't possibly take 45GW anyway) who might possibly be creditworthy, and to provide the financial guarantees and supports to the utilities which could buy Inga-generated electricity, which would be REALLY cheap to generate, probably just a couple of US cents/kWh. That would determine the selling price to customers, who would pay the running costs plus a reasonable margin for the energy they would buy.
If you consider hydropower to cost at least $1m/MW, or $1bn/GW, installed to build (just for simple numbers - all in, and including the long transmission lines, the investment cost would be higher), you'd be looking at a minimum of $45bn for the project. That's beyond the capacity of the multilateral development banks to finance, the DRC doesn't have that money and can't raise it and the Southern African Power Pool, as a potential offtaker, runs on about $5m a year in revenues.
You HAVE been reading my files!
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😂😂
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So sad, why doesn't some big investment bank from America come to the party? How much of the wattage do you think will survive the long journey?
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It's all about the ability of customers to pay - that big American investment bank (if there is one with $45bn to invest) wouldn't be able to recover its investment through revenues...from those customers which can't pay....
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Who will be the customers?
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The primary customers would be electricity utilities in the region. Most of them are technically it really bankrupt and wouldn't give the lenders any comfort they'd be able to pay for the electricity they would buy over the years.
At one point there was an initiative called Westcor for five utilities (from DRC, Angola, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa if memory serves, which it might not) to build DC transmission lines through a Western Corridor (hence the name) to bring Inga electrons to those utilities. It didn't succeed for reasons I won't go into here, but in part because the proponents didn't follow the basics of infrastructure project finance. A real pity - in many ways it was a good idea.
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could be a case of Dutch Disease too.
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And one of the biggest challenges, which cryptocurrency could be instrumental in addressing, is that the customers of those customers (i.e. people buying electricity from their electricity company) aren't considered "creditworthy" under the current conventional financial system. Until the actual customers can be considered able and willing to pay for the electricity they consume, new projects will continue to be difficult to finance under traditional infrastructure project finance mechanisms, and utilities will be difficult to finance under corporate finance as the metrics for repayment to the lenders just won't be there. There are so many ways crypto could address this combination of challenges, in part by changing the payment ecosystem that electricity consumers live in.
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Makes sense.
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