With a few policy changes, can load shedding in Uganda be a thing of the past?

In the past, Uganda as a country suffered greatly from a big challenge known as load shedding. This is a situation in which electricity demand exceeds supply resulting in rationing of power to meet the country’s energy goals. Load shedding negatively impacts the economy not to mention the livelihood of citizens as well as the survival of businesses.

Presently, the situation is much better than before and this can be attributed to a number of things including the energy sector reforms in 2001 that led to the disintegration of the Uganda Electricity Board into generation, transmission, distribution and regulation as stand-alone entities. This move appears to have been the biggest catalyst towards the near elimination of load shedding in the country. Uganda currently has an installed generation capacity of about 800MW with the peak demand not hitting 600MW. This simply means that we generate more power than we can use hence the near extinction of load shedding.

It would be very impetuous to believe the situation will remain this way forever. Even a big economy like South Africa is now suffering greatly from load shedding due to significant load growth. According to the National Development Plan (NDP), Uganda’s peak power demand is rising at about 22.7% per annum. At this rate, Uganda shall not be able to meet its peak demand in not more than 2 years. The question then becomes, “How do we arrest the possibility of falling back into the evil that is load shedding?”

The most sustainable solutions in the long term would be increasing energy production for example the Karuma HPP under development, and building more efficient transmission and distribution systems. High efficiency transformers, superconducting transformers and high temperature superconductors are new technologies which promise much in terms of electrical energy efficiency as new techniques are being studied. It is worth noting that these are all very capital intensive projects that take a number of years to be completed. As a simpler and yet possibly effective alternative in the short term, the government can put in place policies to reduce the country’s peak demand. One policy is putting in place a high unit cost of electricity in the peak hours and a significantly lower cost for the off peak hours. Whereas this is already done for industrial installations, it can be extended to the residential households too since during the peak hours their aggregate demand contributes significantly to the peak demand. In so doing, peak demand is reduced and load shedding postponed at least till the new energy producers are functional.