NAIROBI: Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam, inaugurated in Ethiopia Tuesday, had to overcome financial, logistical and war-related challenges, the Italian construction magnate behind the scheme told AFP.
African leaders joined Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in officially unveiling the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) that has promised to revolutionize the country’s energy sector but also caused tensions with neighboring Egypt.
The dam is the largest by power capacity on the continent and could transform a country where almost half the 130-million population still lacks electricity, according to World Bank data.
“This country that was dark in the evening when I first arrived here... is now selling energy to neighboring countries,” Pietro Salini, CEO of Webuild, the main contractor for the project, told AFP.
Kenya, Tanzania and South Sudan have already agreed deals to buy the electricity.
The dam towers 170 meters (550 feet) high and stretches nearly two kilometers (1.2 miles) across the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border.
The $4-billion megastructure is designed to hold 74 billion cubic meters of water and generate 5,150 megawatts of electricity — more than double Ethiopia’s current capacity.
More than 25,000 people, mostly from Europe and Ethiopia, labored on the giant site from 2011 to its official opening.
Salini said his firm spent some 250,000 hours training workers in health and safety and technical engineering, noting: “The human factor is always the hardest to tackle.”
Neighbouring countries Egypt and Sudan are wrong to worry about the impact of the dam on their water supply, he said.
“The hydroelectric project releases water to produce energy. They are not irrigation schemes that consume water,” said Salini.
“There’s no change in the flow. It’s just regulated,” he added.
Salini also said the project was entirely financed by Ethiopia.
“Not one international lender was willing to put money in this project,” he told AFP.
A brutal civil war between the government and rebels from the Tigray region between 2020 and 2022, which claimed roughly 600,000 lives, also slowed the GERD’S completion.
But all those challenges are now in the past, Salini said.
“At an opening ceremony, you don’t think about past difficulties,” he added.
Ethiopia mega-dam overcame war, funding obstacles
https://arab.news/4c9nn
Ethiopia mega-dam overcame war, funding obstacles
- CEO of Webuild Pietro Salini: ‘This country that was dark in the evening when I first arrived here... is now selling energy to neighboring countries’
- A brutal civil war between the government and rebels from the Tigray region between 2020 and 2022, which claimed roughly 600,000 lives, also slowed the GERD’S completion
Rubio says technical talks with Denmark, Greenland officials over Arctic security have begun
- US Secretary of State on Wednesday appeared eager to downplay Trump’s rift with Europe over Greenland
WASHINGTON: Technical talks between the US, Denmark and Greenland over hatching an Arctic security deal are now underway, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday.
The foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland agreed to create a working group aimed at addressing differences with the US during a Washington meeting earlier this month with Vice President JD Vance and Rubio.
The group was created after President Donald Trump’s repeated calls for the US to take over Greenland, a Danish territory, in the name of countering threats from Russia and China — calls that Greenland, Denmark and European allies forcefully rejected.
“It begins today and it will be a regular process,” Rubio said of the working group, as he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “We’re going to try to do it in a way that isn’t like a media circus every time these conversations happen, because we think that creates more flexibility on both sides to arrive at a positive outcome.”
The Danish Foreign Ministry said Wednesday’s talks focused on “how we can address US concerns about security in the Arctic while respecting the red lines of the Kingdom.” Red lines refers to the sovereignty of Greenland.
Trump’s renewed threats in recent weeks to annex Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of a NATO ally, has roiled US-European relations.
Trump this month announced he would slap new tariffs on Denmark and seven other European countries that opposed his takeover calls, only to abruptly drop his threats after a “framework” for a deal over access to the mineral-rich island was reached, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s help. Few details of the agreement have emerged.
After stiff pushback from European allies to his Greenland rhetoric, Trump also announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week that he would take off the table the possibility of using American military force to acquire Greenland.
The president backed off his tariff threats and softened his language after Wall Street suffered its biggest losses in months over concerns that Trump’s Greenland ambitions could spur a trade war and fundamentally rupture NATO, a 32-member transatlantic military alliance that’s been a linchpin of post-World War II security.
Rubio on Wednesday appeared eager to downplay Trump’s rift with Europe over Greenland.
“We’ve got a little bit of work to do, but I think we’re going to wind up in a good place, and I think you’ll hear the same from our colleagues in Europe very shortly,” Rubio said.
Rubio during Wednesday’s hearing also had a pointed exchange with Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, about Trump repeatedly referring to Greenland as Iceland while at Davos.
“Yeah, he meant to say Greenland, but I think we’re all familiar with presidents that have verbal stumbles,” Rubio said in responding to Kaine’s questions about Trump’s flub — taking a veiled dig at former President Joe Biden. “We’ve had presidents like that before. Some made a lot more than this one.”
