What you need to know:
- This implies that a big hill is yet to be climbed considering the 1,254 MW total as per 2019.
- On a brighter side for the Biomass energy generation however, maybe the dream might be achievable.
According to Uganda’s Vision 2040 of operationalising the country’s transformation into a modern, middle-income one, there is a need for the energy sector to attain a target of 4,500 MW in hydropower, 1,500 MW Geothermal, 24,000 MW Nuclear, 5,000 MW Solar, 1,700 MW Biomass, 800 MW while 4,300 MW being Thermal making it a grand total of 41,800 MW.
This implies that a big hill is yet to be climbed considering the 1,254 MW total as per 2019.
On a brighter side for the Biomass energy generation however, maybe the dream might be achievable.
According to the 2009 Uganda National Rice Development Strategy (UNRDS) report, the total rice production was estimated at 165,000metric tonnes whereas in 2019 the rice paddy production was 220,000 tonnes, projecting a giant leap from 11,440 tonnes in 1970 to 220,000 tonnes implying an annual average growth rate of 9.23 per cent.
Rice husk can become an interesting feedstock for electricity production. According to a 2015 study by P.W Olupot, A. Candia, E Menya and R. Walozi on the Characterisation of Rice Husk varieties on Uganda for biofuels and their techno-economic feasibility in gasification, the results demonstrated that a gasifier generator system of 250kW operating for just eight hours a day for 350 days in a year requires 5.8t of husks per day to produce 700 MW h/year.
With lack of rice husks gasifiers in the country to provide a great uptake of husks as raw material, only a small fraction of rice husk is arguably utilised as fuel for household cooking and say for brick kilns.
Rice mills have to throw the rest away or burn it out as a way of disposal. This creates environmental hazard and air pollution for the surroundings.
By the fact that the total rice consumption was estimated at 225,000 metric tonnes whilst the population growth rate is 3.2 per cent, the demand for rice is expected to rise.
This, therefore, implies that the higher the rise of its consumption, the higher the availability of the rice husks as its by product to be used in the desirable gasification processes.
This comes at a time when Uganda is still faced with pressing energy needs in spite of its efforts on feed-in-tariffs drive, a governmental move directed to promoting the development and use of renewable energy sources from the private sector.
Although amidst the Electricity Regulatory Authority’s (ERA) efforts to ensure sustainable electricity supply and a condusive regulatory environment coupled with incentives aimed at diversifying the country’s power generation mix, the sources still lag a bit behind with hydro being 1,023.59 MW, thermal at 100 MW, cogeneration at 63.9 MW and grid connected solar at 60 MW.
In my opinion, it is possible that with the country’s such ever increasing energy needs, rice husks gasification could be a long term solution because in any case, rice husks gasifiers are increasing rapidly in number in rice-producing countries hence becoming readily available for the Ugandan market to take advantage of, given its increased rice production, if we are to check on the issue of lack of integrated powers sector planning and the need to establish fully functional financial ecosystem to support the sector which are the some of the biggest setbacks to the energy sector, according to the Power Africa Energy Sector Review.
In as much as the installed generation capacity is expected to rise from the 1237.49 MW as of October 2020 to 1837.49 MW by mid-2021 as its projected, we can do even better with supplementary installed rice husks gasifiers.
Mr Solomon A. Mutagaya is a Chemical Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer. msolomon788@gmail.com
