I published an op-ed in Journal du Cameroun setting out two practical improvements for Cameroon’s electricity grid.

Summary

With Nachtigal adding 420 MW, the Ministry of Water and Energy preparing a geographic information platform, the Energy Compact and ENEO’s transformation into SOCADEL, Cameroon has an opportunity to move from adding generation capacity to managing its grid more precisely.

I propose two methods that can be piloted before they are rolled out nationally:

• Create electricity profiles for each load area. They would bring together substation and line loading, incidents, losses, connection requests and forthcoming local developments. Investments could then be ranked against stable criteria — saturation, outage frequency, expected demand, cost and the importance of the users supplied — and placed in a rolling three-to-five-year programme.
• Track losses and collection feeder by feeder. A monthly balance would compare the electricity injected at the head of each feeder, the energy recorded by meters, the volumes billed and the cash actually collected. This would distinguish technical losses from illegal connections, metering failures, customer-database errors or unpaid bills, allowing the operator to choose the right response.

A handful of contrasting territories and around ten medium-voltage feeders would be enough to start. After six to twelve months, the results would show which interventions work, what they recover and which measures deserve to be extended.

→ Read the op-ed in Journal du Cameroun (in French)