Impacts of power distribution feeders upgrading policy on the reliability of electricity supply evidence from Rwanda

Abstract

The national Energy Sector Strategic Plan 2018/19-2023/24 has set a priority to improve industrial competitiveness, through increased reliability of electricity supply. For this to be achieved, the Rwandan government has preserved a huge amount of money to construct new power infrastructures and to upgrade and rehabilitate the existing systems. In this regard, during the past three years, a number of projects targeting to increase the reliability of electricity supply were commissioned, corresponding to huge investments. In this study, we analyse the impacts of these investments on the improvement of electricity supply reliability, by using administrative power outages across various distribution feeders in Rwanda, gathered from the national electric utility. The electricity supply reliability is expressed in terms of the frequency and duration of power outages at different distribution feeder lines. This study exploits the plausibly exogenous variation in the implementation of the policy, to measure if there have been changes in power outages duration and frequency. The results show, the upgrading and rehabilitation of main power distribution feeders across the country have reduced the duration and frequency of power outages. In addition, the impact becomes more significant if we omit the effects of other unobserved variables. The study also investigated the impact of Covid-19 on the reliability of the electricity supply. It was found that the pandemic increased the duration and reduced the frequency of power outages.