Kigali Electricity

Rwanda is full of things that are familiar to what we had in the U.S., but just a little different.  One such example is electricity.  For the most part, our house and other houses around us are provided with elecricity from overhead power lines.  Each house is lit up at night with incandescent or fluorescent lamps.  A lot of people use linear, 2 or 4 foot, fluorecent lamps as exterior lighting by sticking a single lamp fixture on a pole so that it juts out over their fence or gate.  People have electrical outlets throughout their homes and many have TVs, fans, toasters, etc.  We even have a washing machine at our house, though it just stopped working.  Electricity is much less common in the rural parts of Rwanda, but in Kigali it is commonplace.

Differences in Rwandan electricity include the voltage and frequency. The houses here use 230 volt, 50 hertz instead of the 110 volt, 60 hertz used in the U.S. This means that while many of or U.S. electrical products; such as laptops, battery chargers, our portable projector; can still be plugged directly into the outlets, others; such as the X-Box; require a transformer to work. Generally, things that run on DC and have an inverter to get from AC to DC will work here, with the X-Box being a notable exception with the inverter provided by Microsoft, though we've ordered an after market replacement that accepts multiple voltages. American electronics that run on AC directly; like TVs, DVD players, and refrigerators; will not work here without a transformer.
 
Regarldess of the voltage requirements, U.S. plugs will not go into Rwandan outlets without an adapter. We brought a bunch with us and they're really inexpensive, but if we forget to bring one to a coffee shop we probably won't be able to plug in our laptops. Rwanda uses an outlet that accepts plugs with two round pins (type C). Some outlets have a round pin sticking out that requires a hole in the plug to receive (type E).

Another big difference so far has been reliability. Our power has gone out a lot.  Probably 25 to 30% of the days we've been here have been at least partially without power. To be fair, they're working on our street right now and the power outages are probably more frequent for this reason. Water has been out about twice as often for the same reason. It seems that utility lines aren't really marked and the excavating equipment just digs them up. The picture to the left shows an electric line that has been repaired. The evening before we saw the line just sticking out of the ground, wires exposed, and I wondered aloud to Bethany if she thought it was still live. By the next morning somebody had re-connected it with a couple of short wires and some electrical tape.  We're pretty sure it was always a live wire. Scary to think about when you see hundreds of kids walk down our street every day on their way to school.  I've seen lots of exposed wires sticking out of the ground in different parts of the city where they used to (or expect to) have street lights and suspect that the risk of electecution is greater here.

Besides reliability, power quality is a real issue here.  Whenever I go to the restroom I watch our incandescent lamps (25 watt lamps - I didn't know they made such low wattage lamps for overhead lighting) get brighter and dimmer over and over again as the voltage coming in is constantly changing. All major (expensive) electronics need to be plugged into a voltage regulator to avoid dammage.  We have one for our refrigerator and another for our computer equipment. The one for the refrigerator (pictured below) makes a lot of noise when the refrigerator is running. It is rated for a much higher wattage than the one we use for our computers.

The last major difference in electricity between the U.S. and Rwanda is how we buy it. In Rwanda, instead of getting a bill at the end of the month for the amount of electricity we use, we have to pre-purchase electricity and keep track of how much we have left otherwise we could run out. I really like this system as it is easy to monitor our consumption. We go to any of the grocery or convenience stores that sell electricity and water and then give them the unique code for our electric meter. We tell them how much electricity we want to buy and they give us a receipt that includes a 20 digit code. When we get home, we type the code directly into our electric meter and it instantly increases our remaining balance by the amount we purchased. I’ve only bought electricity once so far and I decided to buy 30,000 RWF worth ($49), which was 223.2 kWh. This comes out to $0.22 per kWh, which is a LOT more expensive than what most people pay in the U.S. as the average residential rate for the first three months of 2012 was $0.1157. The increased cost is probably due to how electricity is generated. In the U.S., most electricity is generated from coal (34% in March of 2012 - though dirty, the cheap cost of coal keeps it #1), natural gas (30%), or nuclear (20%), and most of it is domesticly supplied. Rwanda gets 25% of its electricity from imported diesel fuel and another 20% from heavy fuel oil. The remainder is primarily from hydro-electric, though 20% of the total electricity consumed has to be imported from hydro plants in other countries. Here's a link to the Energy, Water, and Sanitation Authority's website on electricity generation. There are plans for a large methane extraction plant at Lake Kivu, but I don't know when this will go into service. The additional need for infrastructure investment in Rwanda probably also contributes to the higher electric rates.