LOCAL ANGOLAN analysts estimate that only 15% of the country's 12 million people have access to electric power. Nevertheless, a major US$500 million development plan for the power sector infrastructure aims to recover the productive capacity of the National Electricity Company (ENE) by rehabilitating most of the nation's hydropower stations. This project, along with a plan to create a national grid by linking the three regional electricity sectors with neighboring countries, promises to not only resolve the country's power problems, but also turn Angola into a regional exporter of electricity. ENE chairman Eduardo Gomes Nelumba stresses that the rehabilitation of infra-structure is a priority because the war greatly affected electric power generation, trans- mission and supply. "It affected supply the most and it was not possible to come up with the needed investments to maintain, improve or expand the supply net-works," he says.

Alongside the US$500 million investment, the government has allocated US$200 mil-lion for repairs to Angola's six dams, of which only three are currently functioning. Plans are also in the works for new dams to be built jointly with neighboring Namibia. But more funds are needed. Mr. Nelumba says that ENE is seeking fresh capital from local and foreign investors. "The main sources of funding come from credit lines from countries with which Angola has trade ties and then there are public funds. ENE itself also makes some investments, but our capacity to do so is small. Another important source of funding comes from the international community through donations," the ENE chairman explains. Foreign private business enterprises in Angola, he points out, are more likely to be successful in areas where ENE has already resolved energy shortages.

"If an investor from the United States, for example, wishes to set up along the coastal strip in Huila and Cunene, we can guarantee that there will be cheap power available because there are no short-ages and we use a cheaper system based on hydro-electric plants there," Mr. Nelumba explains. "We should not, however, forget another important source of electric power generation, which is natural gas," the ENE chief points out. "The gas that flows to the surface during oil exploration can also be used to generate electric-ity. I think that these two sources of power will, in the future, be the main ones in Angola." He adds that the nation's development problems would be resolved if Angola could harness just half of the country's hydropower potential, which the Ministry of Energy and Water estimates to be some 950,000 gigawatts per hour.

"Currently, we don't even reach 100,000 gigawatts per hour," Energy and Water Minister Luis Filipe da Silva points out. "We need to increase exploration and utilization of this valuable resource." Mr. da Silva notes that, because of the war, Angola had to put on hold its strategy of linking the country's three main electricity grids, but now with tensions easing there's a lot of catching up to do in order to modernize several stopgap measures that were applied to alleviate the situation during the conflict. "The war limited the rehabilitation and expansion of the networks, which would have provided a greater number of people with electrical power. So we had to turn to alternative forms of consumption and invest more in the production of thermal energy. And of course these types of power plants normally raise more problems than solutions because maintenance and operational costs are so much higher," Mr. da Silva says.