By Mabinty M. Kamara
The long-awaited energy supply from the West Africa Power Pool Project (WAPP) will energize the power station in Kenema on Thursday 2nd September 2021 and subsequently, supply power into homes in the eastern headquarter, say officials in charge.
The engineer in charge, Paul Charles Saffa says they are certain that with the current pace of the work, the Kenema sub-station will be energized and the utility company; the Electricity Distribution Supply Authority would have signed the Power Purchase and the Interconnection Agreements with a company in Cote d’ Ivoire known as Cairn Energy for transmission of power into homes.
“Under normal circumstance, the homes will get the light on the same day, same hour but we have some agreements that we need to have completed which is yet to be completed as of today but we hope it will be completed before Thursday. And if they are completed before then, Kenema is supposed to get light on Thursday when we energize the power station,” he said.
Ing. Saffa, who is the Country Manager TRANSCO CLSG-Sierra Leone, said other areas like Kono and Bumbuna will be connected in the following two weeks, noting that they are currently working on connecting their network with Kono.
He said they are also working with the mining sites to see how they could work with EDSA to take power from the substations straight to their mining sites.
“For Bumbuna, when once we connect, Bumbuna will synchronize which means anytime Bumbuna wants to send power to Freetown, or Bo or Kenema, they can do it through our lines. All of that will be completed by this September. So in the dry season of this year, we hope that we will not have problems with power. Freetown would have had the Karpowership which is there already and the CLSG powered on,” he said.
He added that in as much as they were hopeful for the completion of the project within the stated time frame, they were also mindful of the possible challenges that the pandemic might pose.
Speaking on the relevance of the project, Ing. Saffa said they hope the power will be used for industrialization, noting that getting power is one thing but its efficient and judicious utilization is another.
“We want to see how we could transform and do value addition to our minerals and agricultural products with the power. We should be able to see how we could situate some of these factories using the basic principles of location of industries along the line. It should be a collaborative effort between the energy sector, mines, and the agricultural sectors”.
The WAP Project aims to provide electricity to the four Mano River Union countries of Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Guinea. When completed, it will bring reliable and affordable electricity to the countries which have had a perennial problem with electricity, especially outside their capitals.
The project involves a power transmission line of 225 KW running through 1,303 KM with 11 substations across the four countries for which Liberia will have four stations, Guinea two and Sierra Leone five. Ivory Coast is the host.
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