The Remarkable Renewable Electricity Generation Resurgence of the Eastern Africa Power Pool

Eight gigawatts in twenty-four months

Omedo returned from Nairobi with a claim that is hard to make quietly: what is happening in the Eastern Africa Power Pool is, in his reading, the most remarkable development the sector has seen in fifty years. The number underneath the claim is a simple one. In the past twenty-four months the pool has added more than 8 GW of new, predominantly low-carbon generation, and is gradually synchronising it to the regional grid.

For scale: that is roughly the entire current installed capacity of Kenya and Tanzania combined, built in two years. The pool it lands in spans 13 countries and more than 600 million people, reaching from the Horn to Egypt and Libya — which is why its centrality on the continent matters. Get the Eastern Africa Power Pool right and it becomes a primary engine for the African Single Electricity Market. Get it wrong and AfSEM stays a communiqué.

The consequence of that build-out is a change of kind, not degree. Only a few EAPP members now run severe structural deficits. The core — Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania — has flipped its energy balance sheet and manages real surpluses. A power pool built as a crisis-management mechanism is becoming something else: a market. Countries with surplus want to sell; countries with deficit want to buy.

The spine that makes a market possible

Surplus alone is inert. What turns it into trade is the Ethiopia–Kenya–Tanzania link: a 1,045 km, ±500 kV bipolar LCC HVDC interconnector capable of asynchronously wheeling an estimated 2,000 MW, now fully operational between Ethiopia's Sodo converter hub and Kenya's Suswa substation. It is the longest asynchronous transmission system on the continent, and it covers three nations.

The piece Omedo is watching next is the proposed Tanzania–Zambia interconnector. If the 400 kV HVAC links between Tanzania and Zambia are completed, it would be the first asynchronous coupling between the Eastern Africa Power Pool and the Southern African Power Pool — equatorial Nile basin hydro able to stabilise drought-stricken grids as far south as Cape Town. Cape to Cairo, in other words, stops being rhetoric.

Five developments doing the work

1. Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam (5 GW). Commissioned in September 2025 after a fourteen-year construction saga conducted through serious geopolitical friction with Egypt and Sudan, and through transboundary litigation over Lake Turkana inflows. Of its 5,150 MW potential, roughly 3,000 MW is operational baseload today. Omedo's verdict is blunt: the GERD is no longer a stranded asset, and Ethiopia is now the unchallenged hydro powerhouse of the pool. Kenya is already importing between 200 MW and 600 MW through Suswa.
2. Tanzania's Julius Nyerere Hydro-Electric Project (2,115 MW). Commissioned on the Rufiji this month, it nearly doubles Tanzania's installed capacity. With JNHPP and Kinyerezi gas, the country now holds roughly 6.5 GW against about 2 GW of demand — which poses Dar es Salaam a genuine strategic question: stimulate industrial load at home, or monetise the surplus through the EKT and ZTK corridors?
3. Kenya's renewable mix. The most diversified and technically resilient stack in the pool: Olkaria geothermal as high-availability baseload, the 310 MW Lake Turkana Wind Power project, a fast-growing utility-scale solar layer, and the Seven Forks cascade used as a hydraulic battery against wind intermittency. KenGen has now mooted long-term plans past 10,000 MW.
4. Uganda's first grid-connected solar (24 MWp). The Ituka plant in West Nile is small in megawatts and large in proof: utility-scale solar connecting directly to a hydro-dominated grid, a milestone larger economies are still struggling to operationalise.
5. The DRC's Grand Inga (40 GW potential). The sleeping giant. If the GERD is the catalyst for this resurgence, any serious movement at Inga — even a fraction of its potential — would make the EAPP the undisputed anchor of a continent-wide single electricity market.

The bill nobody wants: transmission

This is where the article turns from celebration to warning. Generation surplus meets a commercial reality that political discourse tends to skip — antiquated infrastructure, misaligned tariff structures, and transmission and distribution losses that keep unification, and investment, out of reach.

The symptom already visible is stranded capacity. Omedo's example is Lake Turkana Wind Power: the farm was ready to generate, the EPC contract for the Suswa evacuation line was mismanaged and ran roughly a year late, and Kenyan taxpayers paid billions of shillings for energy that was never delivered. As he puts it, paying for air — because of a failure in synchronised planning. While transmission stays a purely public-sector burden financed by expensive DFI loans, grid overhauls will keep running behind generation additions, and that gap is now a regional financial-stability risk.

His comparator is Europe: a grid that evolved from voluntary technical coordination between transmission operators sharing Alpine hydro, through the UCPTE's voluntary codes, into the legally binding ENTSO-E mandate created by the EU's Third Energy Package in 2009 — enforceable network codes and a Ten-Year Network Development Plan. Continental Europe runs synchronously at 50 Hz, but the wider network is a hybrid of asynchronously coupled pools. That, Omedo argues, is the architecture the EAPP should be replicating, and AfSEM needs the same move from cooperation to binding governance.

Where the capital should go next

The article closes with five strategic directives. In summary, and in his framing:

1. Pivot capital from generation to transmission and distribution. In a generation-surplus market, standard DFI loans for new plant — Inga excepted — are a misallocation. The next wave belongs in super-grid backbones and national distribution.
2. Standardise wheeling tariffs and automate cross-pool settlement, building on the methodologies emerging from the Ethiopia–Kenya–Tanzania corridor, with an independent regional energy bank to end multi-month payment delays.
3. Secure utility revenue with smart metering. Distribution losses stay elevated, driven by technical dissipation and, more materially, non-technical theft. Balance sheets cannot service debt without secured cash flow.
4. Scale grid-scale battery storage. Equatorial hydro should not be the only dynamic stabiliser. BESS at nodes such as Suswa, Singida and Tororo captures variable output, holds frequency, and earns arbitrage on a future day-ahead market.
5. Transition in an orderly way to a competitive day-ahead market. Rigid multi-year take-or-pay PPAs — Ethiopia–Kenya at 7 ¢/kWh among them — are accumulating sovereign debt risk. An hourly merit-order auction would put low-marginal-cost hydro and geothermal ahead of thermal and pull regional tariffs down.

Author's disclaimer. The views in the original article are the author's own and do not in any way represent the views of his organisation.
Editor's note. This page is Interglobal EcoVista's summary of an article first published on LinkedIn on 31 August 2026 and is reproduced with the figures and framing of the original. Graphics are the author's. Quotations are drawn from the original text; the full article remains on LinkedIn.