” The Grand Inga dam can provide 2/3 of African power needs and some of Europe’s”
While integration – meaning electrical inter – connections of neighbours – on the
one hand may enable cheap electricity, on the other, it can cause dependence.
Therefore, to avoid a single source dependency, it might be seen as a better
solution, to use less favourable resources inside a given country, and accept higher
costs and other disadvantages. Another way out of this dilemma is diversification of
interconnections. Therefore regional integration may be more attractive when the
number of participating countries rises.
In some cases, regional integration is the only reasonable way of using known
resources which are too big for a national approach.
An extreme example is the hydropower potential near Inga, by the Congo River, in
the Democratic Republic of Congo. The African Power Pools have been formed in
order to erect large scale regional integration projects – leading in a structure one
may call an African Supergrid – to be able to handle the tremendous amount of
electricity which could be produced here at very low prices, and which would be
enough to deliver two thirds of the current African consumption. But the huge
capacity makes it difficult to bring the different objectives together.
