Energy

The acting Managing Director of PNG Power is setting ambitious targets.

Carolyn Blacklock, acting Managing Director of state utility PNG Power, says the money that will come from the Papua New Guinea Electrification Partnership, established at the 2018 AsiaPacific Economic Cooperation meeting, will greatly assist the roll-out of electricity. She says PNG Power has sharply increased the number of connections and will concentrate on hydropower.

The Papua New Guinea Electrification Partnership has been struck with Australia,

Japan, New Zealand and the United States. It has the goal of connecting 70 per cent of the population to electricity by 2030. (Currently only about 13 per cent of Papua New Guinea’s population have reliable access to electricity.)

‘What it says is: if you have good governance, they will back you,’ Blacklock told business leaders. ‘The PNG Electrification Partnership is not loans; it is not tied aid.

‘It is real money, starting with US$45 million from January in 2019. We don’t have to go through hoops. We will procure, and they will come and check we have done the connections. Then they will give us the money. It is that simple.’

Blacklock says the development of PNG’S electricity grid tends to be implemented piecemeal ‘with

WE NEED TO THINK OF OURSELVES AS THE INSTITUTION THAT UNDERWRITES THE FUTURE OF OUR COUNTRY. Carolyn Blacklock

district money’. It means new funding continuously has to be found.

‘This is admirable, but it is not going to get up the development of PNG that we need. This Electrification Partnership stops PNG Power from having to borrow money. We can’t afford the K3.6 billion price tag to electrify our country.

‘We also do have a challenge in that when we do need to spend our money, we need to make sure we reduce the tariff [to customers]. We can only increase the number of customers on the grid by half before people stop being able to afford it.

‘If you are a subsistence farmer, you cannot afford it. We will be able to connect you, but that line will remain un-energised. We have to bring this tariff down. So we are going to spend our money on making sure we are becoming super efficient in our power generation.’

Connections

Blacklock says PNG Power has been doing about 2500 connections a year for the ten years to 2017. In 2018, the figure was to rise to 19,000. ‘In 2019, we are going to set ourselves a target of 30,000 connections. We are going to do that across the country’.

Blacklock says PNG Power is supplying more power to Harmony Gold in Hidden Valley and has also increased supply to Mainland Holdings. The company is negotiating with Newcrest over the Wafi-golpu mine. ‘ With a blended tariff, it is probably going to be in the order of six US cents a kilowatt hour cheaper than what they can do.’

Blacklock says the company has also been concentrating on reestablishing its low cost hydropower installations in Lae. 

PNG Power workers Credit: PNG Power