Challenges
Uganda’s Large-Dams-Only Folly
Few policies are more foolish and destructive to our sustainable economic future than the government’s spendthrift investments in large hydroelectric dams along Uganda’s priceless rivers – instead of creating a balanced portfolio of smaller and alternative sources of energy that are more cost-effective, robust and capable.
The government has embraced the false hope that its large-dams-only program will meet the growing demand for electricity. In fact, it will make Uganda less self-reliant and more vulnerable – and already has.
By diverting scarce public investments from surer ways to meet our growing needs, this large-dams-only policy will burden generations of taxpayers and consumers with huge fixed costs to build and maintain this inefficient power generation and transmission line infrastructure. The Bujagali Dam nearing completion in 2011 has probably cost over $US1 billion, although the government refuses to disclose final costs. Already, estimated costs to build the proposed Karuma Dam have more than doubled to $2.2US billion.
Financing these dam projects will require huge new borrowing in international markets that further expose us to destabilizing economic shocks. The government claims that taxes and royalties on new oil production will finance new dams. But this ignores the harsh realities of global oil markets and the folly of spending money we have yet collected, and may never collect.
Broken Promises
The large-dams-only policy also ignores the repeated failure of Uganda’s existing large dams to produce promised quantities of electricity – each of them generating far less – in part because of the falling level of Lake Victoria. For example, the Kiira Dam (Owen Falls Extension Dam), built in the last decade, was planned to generate 200MW of power, but today produces less than 40MW.
Despite installed capacity of 630MW nationwide, almost half produces no electricity largely because of the reduced water level of Lake Victoria, the government admits. The government blames nature for this, recent droughts, implying that this is temporary – ignoring the impact of climate change that will likely increase droughts.
Moreover, the more serious cause is human engineering in the Owens Falls Dam at the source of the Nile; by blasting a deeper channel to increase its flow, the excessive flow is draining Lake Victoria. A major study in 2006 by a respected hydrologist, Daniel Kull, documented this. “Recent severe drops in Lake Victoria (2004-2005) are approximately 45% due to drought and 55% due to over-releases from the Owen Falls Dams,” he concluded. That dam, he noted, “effectively transformed Lake Victoria from a natural lake to a reservoir, controlling the lake’s outflow to the Victoria Nile.”
Affected People Suffer
Besides the huge direct costs of building large dams are the also huge indirect costs to hundreds of thousands of Ugandans who lose their property and livelihood to flooding for new reservoirs. Other indirect costs are the disruption of river and lake fisheries, loss of productive croplands and forests, diminished biodiversity, worsening droughts, and lower levels of Lake Victoria. The government ignores these costs – but Ugandans are paying for them anyway.
Uganda needs cost-effective, diversified, sustainable methods to meet its energy needs. They exist, they work, and they are affordable. They include decentralized sources of electricity from renewables like solar and geothermal projects, low-impact non-dam hydropower facilities, co-generation, and the cheapest, most reliable source of all, energy efficiency.
To read documents about dams, click here for Library.
To read more about NAPE’s action agenda, click here.
