Cape Town - Countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have the long-term potential to triple existing power generation capacity to about 150 000MW, much of which will be supplied by the Inga hydropower project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The estimate was made by the Southern African Power Pool (Sapp), the SADC body for a common electricity market, which met in Cape Town last week to track priority transmission projects designed to prevent an energy crunch in the region.
The short-term new generation projects were "on track", said Lawrence Musaba, manager of Sapp's co-ordination centre.
They would generate additional capacity of 9 000MW within three years, staving off power shortages that would have arisen in 2007 without investment in new-generation infrastructure. Regional demand for electricity is currently about 42 000MW, while capacity is about 50 000MW.
Musaba said other priority transmission projects included interconnecting three SADC members to the grid for the first time: Angola, Malawi and Tanzania.
Thulani Gcabashe, the chief executive of Eskom, said $20 billion (R126 billion) would be invested in the region's new priority generation projects.
The figure includes R62 billion that Eskom and independent power producers will spend over five years to create about 5 000MW of additional generation capacity in South Africa.
South Africa provides almost 80 percent of southern Africa's capacity, but once all the phases of Inga on the Congo River come on stream, the DRC will be the region's single biggest power generator.
Inga 1 and 2 are being revamped, while a third phase is planned to add 3 500MW to the regional grid.
The power will be exported to Angola, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, with additions of 6 000MW from Angola and 800MW from Namibia along the way.
The final phase, Grand Inga, which involves constructing a small dam on the world's second-biggest river, is a long-term project with potential rated output of 39 000MW - almost equal to South Africa's existing capacity.
In the medium term, new projects would add 32 000MW of capacity to the SADC grid, rising to 100 000MW in the long term, said Musaba. Efforts were being made to investigate several other long-term options, including a project in Mozambique to generate capacity of 2 000MW.
Lindiwe Hendricks, the minerals and energy minister, said increased regional co-operation in the energy sector was a priority. South Africa's target of 6 percent growth created "significant opportunities" for expanding the electricity and energy industries of neighbouring countries. This came on top of its own drive to expand electricity supply and establish independent power producers.
Hendricks reiterated the government position that other energy sources such as renewables and nuclear could be used to tackle diminishing generation capacity.