- The Mozambican government has announced that it would launch international public tenders by June for contracting entities to carry out studies to construct the Mpanda Nkuwa hydroelectric dam.
The director of the Mpanda Nkuwa Hydropower Project Implementation Office (Gmnk), Carlos Yum, said at a press conference held last Friday in Maputo, that the tender would select institutions to carry out environmental, market, hydrological, geotechnical and financial impact studies for the construction of the project.
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Originally planned several years ago, the Mphanda Nkuwa project was relaunched by the President Nyusi in 2018, and would be the largest dam in Mozambique after Cahora Bassa. It will be located 60 kilometres downstream from Cahora Bassa on the Zambezi River in the interior of Mozambique, about 1,500 kilometres northwest of Maputo, the Mozambican capital.
“The studies are supposed to take between two and two and a half years to conduct, but we are trying to shorten them to a year to a year and a half,” Yum said.
Yum said that building the dam was expected to begin in 2024 and last at least seven years. “Mozambique wants to be the energy hub in southern Africa because it has natural resources for that,” he added. The infrastructure, he continued, is budgeted at between USD4.5 billion (€3.6 million) and USD5 billion (€4.1 billion) and will have the capacity to generate between 1300MW and 1500MW.
That amount of power will make Mpanda Nkuwa the second-largest hydroelectric dam in the country, after the Cahora Bassa Hydroelectric Dam (HCB), which generates 2070 MW.
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
Source: LUSA
