Uganda's energy sector: Challenges and opportunities

The East African region has been undergoing fast economic growth particularly as demonstrated by its resilience against the effects of World recession since 2008. This is particularly true for Uganda. Sustaining this growth will however require affordable and reliable power supply which is currently a major challenge. World-over the “smart grid” concept is poised to transform the way energy is generated, transmitted and utilized. Since there is no exact description of what constitutes a smart grid, each country has to assess its own needs in order to design a smart grid to meet them. In this paper, we present the findings of an exploratory research to ascertain Uganda's smart grid requirements. These findings were obtained through face-to-face interviews, observation, questionnaires to industrial and commercial consumers of electricity, and site visits to utility companies in the generation, transmission and distribution sectors. We find that Uganda generates sufficient power to meet the current demand but delivering it is still a challenge. The distribution grid is grappling with vandalism, old transformers and illegal connections and energy losses of about 30%. These issues, coupled with high cost of generation, have made electricity expensive and unstable. We propose that a smart grid solution with an automatic metering infrastructure (AMI) and distribution automation is appropriate as it will facilitate load shaping through variable pricing of power and curb vandalism.