Egypt Trounces South Africa as the Continent’s Top Electricity Producer

Egypt has reached installed capacity of 55,000 Megawatts of electricity per day, the country’s supervisory minister for energy says.

That is some 3,000MW higher than produced by South Africa, to go by that’s country’s own official figures.But capacity, especially of African infrastructure, doesn’t always translate to actual delivery.

“Starting from 2014 up till the end of 2018, the total capacity added to the network was 25,426 Megawatts”, declares Mohammed Shaker, Egypt’s Minister of Electricity and Renewable Energy.

85% of the power is fuelled by natural gas.

“The 25,426MW was approximately the maximum load we could supply during 2014, which means we already doubled what we have at that time”, Shaker explains.

South Africa doesn’t have that kind of story to tell, as the state power utility grapples with a debt load of about $30Billion, borrowing money on short-term contracts to help it meet its commitments to its long-term loans.

But whereas Eskom is a clear corporate entity, it is difficult to differentiate the Egyptian Electricity Holding company from the Egyptian state itself.

“The installed capacity in Egypt is almost exceeding 55 Gigawatts although our consumption is less than that but we are trying to depend on the operations of high efficiency generators, combined cycle and because of these we could manage the to reduce the consumption of fuel to a great extent and this will be reflected on the cost of tariff”, says the minister, a former Professor of Electrical Power Engineering at the Cairo University.

“Almost 60-65% of the cost of tariff is as a result of the fuel, if we have savings in the fuel consumption, it makes a difference for the costing of electricity”.