Liberia: Hydroelectric power restored after 25 years

By Evelyn Kpadeh Seagbeh

MONROVIA, Liberia

Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has ushered in a new era for the country by throwing the switch to turn on its hydroelectric power plant after it lay inactive 25 years.

The Mt. Coffee Hydroelectric Power Plant going online again, after two weeks of testing, is restoring the country’s damaged electrical system for the first time since 1990, when the unit was destroyed during the civil war.

“I committed in 2006 to restore electricity in Liberia,” Sirleaf said at the commissioning ceremony. “Today we have fulfilled this promise.”

Built in 1966, Mt. Coffee was the country’s major source of electricity before the civil war in the 1980s, when it was looted and largely destroyed.

Addressing the nation, Sirleaf said that with the rehabilitation of the plant, it is her hope that electricity will be affordable to more people.

The switching on of the first completed turbine with its 22-megawatt capacity is today supplying 15 megawatts in the first phase.

The second turbine, now 90 percent completed, will subsequently increase the capacity to 44 megawatts.

The total cost of the plant’s rehabilitation is $357 million, with 80 percent of that sum provided in grants and 20 percent in loans from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) of the United, the European Investment Bank, and the governments of Norway, Germany, and Liberia itself.