Interests making power costly

Had we not signed that deal with Ethiopia to sell to us 200MW of electricity, we would be suffering crippling power shortages today. FILE PHOTO | AFP

I maintain that had we not signed that deal with Ethiopia to sell to us 200MW of electricity, we would be suffering crippling power shortages today.

What the Ethiopians are selling to us at a price of US cents 6.5 per unit makes that country one of the cheapest sources of power on our electricity grid.

The Ethiopians were willing to sell to us 200Mw more, but the Lords of Poverty in the electricity sector would hear none of it.

We should have negotiated more from a source that will remain stable until the day the River Nile dries up. We should have locked it in before countries like Djibouti and Sudan discover this opportunity.

I also believe that were it not for the fact that the electricity sector was at that point in time under the stewardship of Rt Major General Gordon Kilahangwa, the deal with the Ethiopians would not have happened.

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It only happened because the General entered that space as an outsider with no links to interest aligned with the merchant power plants and networks in the sector who have sold and made our policymakers believe that consumer electricity prices must be kept high to encourage private investment to keep flowing into the sector.

The most popular catchphrase for this snobbish lot is as follows: expensive power is much better than no power ‘. If that were true, why is it that Ethiopian power- that has to travel more than 800 kilometres from Gibe to a sub-station in Suswa, still hits the grid at a cheaper rate than the electricity produced locally?

I insist that the reason we took almost seven years to start buying cheaper power from Ethiopia was because of resistance by interests who support the position that consumer tariffs have to be kept high to incentivise private investment to keep flowing.

Currently, the narrative and wisdom of the regime in power are that electricity prices must go up so that KPLC can return to profitability.

What we do not appreciate is that one of the main reasons why we are being told that the electricity prices must go up is because the consumer must produce the revenues to pay the latest independent power producer to have joined the grid- namely, Kipeto, Malindi, Power and the three Eldoret based solar plants-namely, Eldosol, Solenkei and Kessses.

Very powerful individuals have interests in these plants. We all remember the letter from the sector regulator, Energy and Petroleum Authority late last year that directed Kenya Power to submit a retail tariff application by October 22, to give ample time for the review of the application and stakeholder engagements.

The sting in the tail of that letter was a paragraph where the regulator said: ‘The retail tariff application must consider the revenue requirements of the already commissioned power plants and the expected plants to be completed within the tariff control period’.

Plainly, said the regulator was saying that the new IPPs have to be paid.

Until last year, the trend we were seeing was that policy was shifting to focusing on affordable electricity for the people.

Indeed, the main reason electricity prices are high is that we have been in a regime where policy has elevated the promotion of private investment in the sector above the delivery of affordable power to the ordinary man and woman in this country.

I always find myself going back to the quotes of one of America’s most prolific inventors of all time, Thomas Edison, who acquired a record 1,093 patents and was the driving force behind such innovations as the incandescent light bulb and some of the earliest motion picture cameras.

Edison was once quoted as saying that his ambition as an inventor was to make electricity so cheap that only the very rich could afford to burn candles. He wanted to make candles a luxury for the rich.

When Lenin was at one time asked to describe the concept ‘development’, he famously answered: “Socialism plus cheap electricity.”

In the 1920s, the pioneering Finnish electrical engineer Bernard Wuolle concluded that the degree of electrification is the best measure of a nation’s level of development.

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We must restore a balance in the sharing of investment risks and profits between industry players, regularly update the least-cost power development plan and adopt a policy of automatic and prompt reimbursement by the government of costs for services that Kenya Power has extended to the public at subsidised prices.

Cheap power to the people should be our clarion call.