Electricity is one of the basic infrastructures that play a great role on the socioeconomic development of a country. It touches every aspect of lives of people from cuisine to transportation and income generation.
The Ethiopian government has set a national plan to increase the provision of electricity for the whole country by 2025. The core of the plan is to improve access of electricity for the wider community especially who live in the countryside. However, despite the critical significance of energy, there is low accessibility with 58 percent coverage across the country.
It is only about 20 million people who are getting electricity and most of them live in urban areas. Even these beneficiaries do not have guarantee for the already serving energy as it fluctuates from time to time. Previously, the Ethiopian Electric Utility (EEU) used to make its customers travel to the capital to facilitate preconditions to get energy.
However, currently it has organized new structure that reaches the states in order to enable the customers to finalize the prerequisites in the nearby branch of EEU. Hence, the EEU has recently signed an agreement with Commercial Bank of Ethiopia to facilitate precondition for services through the bank starting from the coming April.
The agreement is believed to save time and energy of customers and the utility. This new structure will satisfy the customers through upgrading the workers’ skills and knowledge and employing well trained engineers in the field. On the other hand, the energy demand is increasing through time.
In this regard, the EEU is endeavoring to balance the gap between demand and supply. Considering the extended plan and the rest of the time, EEU Corporate Communication Director Melaku Taye said, “It seems hard but we do our level best to achieve the plan.”
In a bid to address its service accessibility, the EEU has been restructuring its regional districts in which it can serve the nine states and two city administrations with 28 districts and 517 service providing centers. In addition to this, the utility undertakes various measures to curb problems related to power fluctuation.
Therefore, the institution has been undertaking improvements through upgrading transmission lines and replacing old transformers at a cost of 162 million USD in various main cities including the capital, Melaku said. Presently, the utility is working to install new transformers. To this end, it has inked an agreement with five local transformer producing companies to provide 4978 transformers at a cost of more than two billion Birr.
The installation of the transformers would enable customers who have been waiting for long to enjoy the electric services besides electrifying more houses. Today the utility is undertaking the construction of substation that has the capacity of holding 132kv energy and 115.6 km optical fiber installation in the capital.
Similarly, it is also fixing over 1000 km long optical cables side by side to the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) installation in seven main cities including Adama, Bahir Dar, Dessie, Dire Dawa, Hawassa, Jimma and Mekele. In the plan of energy accessibility expansion, it has done the electrification of 64 cities. In general, currently 6,905 cities became electrified and the national coverage reached 58 percent. Melaku noted that the utility is endeavoring to modernize its services by implementing Enterprise Resource Planning system (EPR).
The EPR system comprised the installation of new technologies including SCADA, prepaid system and remote sense smart metric system. The technologies that are expected to solve power fluctuation are currently under installation. The EEU is also organizing new communication center equipped with state-of-the-art technologies and more than 100 telephone lines to receive claims and respond to requests of customers on time. These would help to curb power fluctuation as it enables the organization to solve power disruptions through effective communication and technology. The construction of the new center is at final stage. Energy distribution fluctuation occurs due to the technical and nontechnical failures.
The technical failure is related to the old serving power inputs such as transmission lines and transformers while the non-technical hindrances are natural disaster and manmade faults like earth quake, thunder, wind and rainfall. Similarly, the distribution can also be disrupted by car accident and other manmade flaws.
The major problems that restrain the institution from its achievements are shortage of finance and input. And it is working to curb the problems through amending tariff on its services, the Director added. According to the Ethiopian Electric Power, the country has been undertaking the construction of various power plants to generate 17,561 MW electric powers at the end of the second Growth and Transformation Plan.
It is also constructing 10,000 km power transmission lines and 11 power distributing stations. However, most of the works are mainly intended to power trade and heavy industries. In order to solve the problems the rural society is facing, the stakeholders must cooperate to effectively respond to energy demand and give priority to house appliances.
The Ethiopian Herald January 29 /2019
BY YOHANES JEMANEH
