The Swiss-Swedish electrical engineering group, Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), recently began stretching 68 kilometers of power lines, linking three power stations in northern Sudan to the capital Khartoum, which suffers chronic power shortages. ABB was commissioned to build 148 towers of 220-kilovolts and 34 towers of 110-kilovolts, the SUNA news agency reported.
The government invited the private sector to participate in the $23.2 million project, after a law had been past last year allowing national and foreign investors to partake in the generating and distributing of electricity, a business which has hitherto been a government monopoly.
Sudan is serviced by two interconnected electricity networks—the Blue Nile grid and the Western grid. However, 70 percent of the country’s 30-million strong population is still well outside the reach of the national system.
At present, Sudan's installed electricity generating capacity totals an estimated 430 megawatts, less than half the actual daily demand. — (menareport.com)
© 2002 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
