Giant Dam Projects Aim To Transform African Power Supplies

PARIS — As the world's political leaders debate ways to alleviate poverty in Africa, industrialists are moving ahead with their own designs for pan-African development - including the building of the world's largest hydroelectric dam at a bend in the Congo River, between Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Atlantic Ocean.

Called Grand Inga, this giant dam will cost $80 billion to build and will have twice the installed generating capacity of the current record-holder, the Three Gorges Dam in China. Grand Inga would produce enough electricity to serve all of the more than 500 million Africans who currently go without.

While it remains to be seen whether recent leaps in transmission technology are sufficient to carry electricity over Africa's vast distances and physical barriers like the blistering sands of the Sahara, power-hungry countries as far away as Egypt and Nigeria are interested in Grand Inga's potential supply.

"This is a Marshall Plan for Africa," said Gerald Doucet, secretary general of the World Energy Council, the overseer of the project, which is being developed with Westcor - a consortium of power companies from neighboring countries including Namibia, Angola and South Africa - and with international power and engineering giants, including ABB of Sweden, E.ON of Germany, EDF of France, Union Fenosa of Spain and SNC-Lavalin of Canada.