Energy in Ethiopia
Almost all recent developments are taking place in the secondary energy sector, with the construction of mainly hydropower plants and power transmission lines being most visible.
Beyond the renewables, Ethiopia also has resources of nonrenewable primary energies (oil, natural gas, coal), but it does not exploit them.
[2][7] The currently used biomass / biofuels for primary energy production in most cases do not need to be transported over more than local distances.
The reason is simple: Ethiopia was (and still is to some extent) a subsistence economy, where the vast majority of goods is produced and consumed locally within a few kilometers around the home of people.
[7] There are also low-priority plans to connect the triangle Kenya, South Sudan and Ethiopia through crude oil pipelines as part of the Kenyan LAPSSET-corridor.
The three main energy carriers in Ethiopia are refined oil products (diesel, gasoline, kerosene), electricity (from solar radiation, water, wind, heat) and bioethanol (from sugarcane).
Electricity is about to replace diesel as the main energy carrier in Ethiopia – but taken all refined oil products altogether (38.5 TWh in 2014), electricity (22.5 TWh in 2016) will still take a few years before it will surpass oil products as main energy carrier.
As Ethiopia is leaving the state of a subsistence economy, the demand for the transportation of goods is quickly increasing.
After blending the gasoline, around 60–70 % of the ethanol is left over, this fuel goes into modern cook stoves as is provided to Ethiopia through Project Gaia.
The country focuses on the production of electricity from a mix of cheap and clean renewable primary energy sources like hydropower or wind power.
It is an expressed wish of the Ethiopian government to become a world class exporter of large amounts of clean, cheap renewable energies in the future.
This was due to an ambitious program to build wind farms and hydropower plants to produce electricity.
Ethiopia fully focuses on renewable energies, mainly from hydropower and wind power, to increase its installed electricity production capacity.
Ever since, Egypt under international law vetoed almost all projects in Ethiopia that sought to utilize the local Nile tributaries.
One example for this discouraging effect is the Chemoga Yeda-project, that, according to Ethiopian voices, was considered to affect less than 1% of the water system of the Blue Nile.
This project in 2011 had secured external financing and was considered under construction already, when it received an Egyptian veto under international law.
Nonetheless, in 2013 Egypt issued harsh statements just short of war threatening, seeing the River Nile as its sole lifeline in danger.
Almost 80% of the identified favorable sites for wind power development are within the Somali Region of Ethiopia, most of it which would require long transmission lines to the Ethiopian cities.
Ethiopia aims to diversify its electricity generation capabilities by investing into an energy mix, of which photovoltaics will be a part.
[2] It is planned to develop 570 MW of geothermal energy at two different sites within the Great Rift Valley, Ethiopia.
In exploiting geothermal energies, Ethiopia is piloting a way that was previously unknown to this country in the energy sector (which is otherwise entirely owned by the state): foreign direct investments with a full private ownership of power plants for 25 years with a power purchase agreement in place with a guaranteed price of US ¢7.53/kWh for the enterprise developing the Corbetti thermal site.
If one assumes a decent capacity factor of 0.8 (typical value for thermal power plants), there might be indeed some excess electricity added to the national grid.
The generated energy will not add much to the national grid but it will prevent the sugar factories from becoming net consumers of electricity.
These systems were distributed to remote rural communities to power school rooms, offices of authorities and households.
To work around these outages, shortages and the rationing, some companies started to build their own substations to become independent from the public ones after which they enjoyed a more stable access to the grid with a higher allowed energy consumption.
[26] As a consequence of the shortages, Ethiopia in 2017 and 2018 invested a lot in new substations and standard voltage transmission lines with the promise, that at least the main urban centers and industrial parks would see a more stable electricity supply in 2018.
For large energy exports to the wider East African area, Ethiopia and Kenya are now building a 500 kV HVDC line over 1045 km length, that is expected to carry 2 GW.
[28] Plans to substitute the truck transport by 110 tank waggons on the newly built Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway didn't arrive in reality in 2017.
The bioethanol production plants have road access but are usually located in remote areas so that tank trucks need to be used.
A multi-fuel pipeline is currently (2017) being built until 2019 over 500 km–600 km from Djibouti to Central Ethiopia (Awash), where a storage facility exists.
