Hydropower in the DRC — Inga III, Grand Inga, and the unfinished decade

<p>The Congo River drops 96 metres over a 14-kilometre stretch at Inga, west of Kinshasa. The hydropower potential at that stretch is, by World Bank reckoning, 44,000 MW — more than the entire installed capacity of South Africa. The two existing dams, Inga I (1972) and Inga II (1982), generate about 1,775 MW between them when running, less than half the installed nameplate because of chronic turbine failure and silt accumulation. The proposed Inga III project would add 11,000 MW. The proposed Grand Inga complex would, by 2050 in the most ambitious scenario, deliver the full 44,000 MW.</p> <p>Inga III has been &#x27;imminent&#x27; since 2009. The current consortium, after multiple restructurings, is a partnership between a Chinese state-owned construction lead and Spanish, Korean, and South African industrial partners. The financing envelope has expanded from $13 billion in 2013 estimates to over $25 billion in 2024 estimates. Construction has not started. The civil and structural pre-works have not been bid. The PPA — Power Purchase Agreement — between the DRC&#x27;s SNEL (national utility), Eskom in South Africa, and the smaller off-takers in Zambia, Angola, and Nigeria has been redrafted four times and signed by none of the relevant parties.</p> <p>Why? The standard answer is governance — Congolese state capacity, contract politics, the rotating cast of energy ministers. That is part of it. The harder answer is that the macro-economics of the off-takers are not stable enough to underwrite a thirty-year PPA at the volumes Inga III requires. Eskom&#x27;s financial condition, the unresolved South African coal-vs-renewables transition, the Zambian copper-mining electricity demand projections that swing with global metal prices — every off-taker presents a different version of the same problem. The financiers cannot price the off-take risk credibly because the off-takers cannot present credible thirty-year electricity demand projections.</p> <p>There is a smaller, more buildable alternative that the SNEL technical staff have been drafting since the early 2010s. *Inga Run-of-River* phase — a smaller, $4-6 billion rehabilitation and capacity-uprating of the existing Inga I and II infrastructure plus a third smaller dam, delivering perhaps 4,000-5,000 MW. This is less politically exciting and more technically feasible. The Congolese state has, on three different occasions, drifted toward this option before being pulled back by Chinese and South African pressure to keep the Grand Inga / Inga III framework alive.</p> <p>The opportunity cost is enormous. Every year of Inga III delay is another year of Kinshasa load-shedding, Lubumbashi mining-sector grid instability, and Brazzaville diesel-generator dependence. The &#x27;green hydrogen for export&#x27; framing that has crept into the Inga III narrative in the last five years is a distraction. The first hundred kilometres around Inga have an electrification rate below 20%. Building Africa&#x27;s largest hydropower complex to export electrons to a European hydrogen market while the immediate hinterland runs on candles is not a technical-policy problem. It is a political-economy problem that will not be solved by another financing-modalities study.</p>