Grand Inga Stakeholders Meeting | DRC
The stakeholders in the Grand Inga project are having a virtual conference that is running from 22 to 29 June. This conference brings together both the Congolese party, the African Development Bank, developers of this project as well as other interested financial partners.
In the technical note presented by the DRC’s Minister in charge of Hydraulics and Electricity, Eustache Muhanzi Mubembe, during the commencement of the workshop, these 5 points stand out:
Presentation of current and future opportunities of the Grand Inga project and other investment activities in the electrical energy sector in the DRC especially on the Congo River and its tributaries;
Encourage calls for expressions of interest from participants to purchase the energy to be produced in subsequent phases of the Grand Inga project;
Encourage in-depth dialogue and investment collaboration between public and private entrepreneurs, and the highest political and economic bodies, both at the DRC and continental level;
Present an overview of the current state of bilateral and regional political and technical cooperation/integration on sustainable energy;
Recommend a basic framework to guide the DRC ahead of a Conference of African Heads of State. The experts will continue to contribute, after this virtual technical conference, to the preparation of the Conference of African Heads of State in September/October 2020.
However, these discussions will take into account options already effected by the DRC for its energy policy, which is based in particular on three points:
1. Liberalize the electricity sector by Law No. 14/011 of 17 June 2014 with an appropriate and attractive institutional and legal framework;
2. Focus on the energy resources available to increase energy supply and access to electricity for all, cost-effectively with environmental protection;
3. Develop Grand Inga simultaneously with other sites scattered throughout the country to meet the needs of all.
Note that the Grand Inga project has been in the saddle for almost 40 years now. More recently, resolutions of the work of the last four workshops organized in collaboration with the African Development Bank successively in Johannesburg in November 2019, Abidjan in December 2019 and January 2020 and finally, in Kinshasa in March 2020, all converge towards the actual realization of the Grand Inga hydroelectric project starting with the Inga 3 power plant with a capacity of 11,000MW and beyond.
