SUB-Saharan African nations need to integrate their power-distribution systems to help meet the region’s increasing energy needs, says Black & Veatch chief financial officer Karen Daniel.
"The integration of the delivery of power is a big deal," Ms Daniel said in Johannesburg where the US developer of energy and water infrastructure announced this week it had opened a local unit.
"People are going to really figure it out in a way that it will be more regional as opposed to country specific."
Black & Veatch, based in Kansas, was seeking to expand its business in sub-Saharan Africa, where countries were "way behind" on developing power systems, Ms Daniel said.
While power-generation capacity in sub-Saharan Africa was expected to quadruple to 385GW by 2040, 530-million people would probably remain without electricity, the International Energy Agency said in a report last October.
Regional power generation and interconnection projects offered the prospect of increased access to electricity, as well as cheaper power, professional services network PwC said in a report this year.
In SA, Black & Veatch is working on Eskom’s 4,800MW Kusile coal-fired project currently under construction, and it is also advising the power utility on managing power breaks at its existing assets.
Other opportunities in the region included projects stemming from natural gas discoveries in Mozambique, Ms Daniel said.
Mozambique has gas reserves with the potential to vault the country into the top three producers of liquefied natural gas in the next decade, oil and gas exploration company Anadarko Petroleum has said.
"The gas that is going to come out of Mozambique will have a huge impact in sub-Saharan Africa. That’s going to generate a lot of spending here in the southern part of Africa," Ms Daniel said.
She is also a member of US President Barack Obama’s advisory council on doing business in Africa, which in April presented recommendations to US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. Her office had indicated it would focus on the council’s proposals to attract more investors to projects in Africa and the creation of an African infrastructure business centre, Ms Daniel said.
The proposed centre would gather data about planned and existing infrastructure projects in Africa and provide a forum for investors to connect with governments and prospective local and international partners, Ms Daniel said.
"That might not sound like a lot, but when you’re a whole continent away trying to figure out how to do business, getting those agencies connected will be a really important piece of integrating the whole infrastructure process," she said.
