Electricity: Nachtigal put to the test of transport and distribution
The massive injection of megawatts into the national interconnection circuits does not automatically guarantee the stabilization of energy supply to final consumers. One year after its full commissioning in May 2025, the Nachtigal hydroelectric facility delivered a consolidated volume of 3,613,785 megawatt-hours (approximately 3.6 terawatt-hours) to the interconnected South grid as of the end of May 2026.
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The Ndokoa infrastructure, designed to generate 420 megawatts through seven 60-megawatt alternators, is calibrated to cover nearly 30% of the country's global demand. However, despite a technical availability rate of 94% and a maintenance execution level of 99% by the operator Nachtigal Hydro Power Company (NHPC), power outages persist in an endemic manner in urban and industrial centers. The situation highlights a synchronization breakdown between the production apparatus and the transmission capacities of network managers.
The core of the problem now shifts from resource availability to the physical routing of electrical flows. The Nachtigal plant operates on the principle of a run-of-river power plant, a technology that requires immediate evacuation of the produced energy, without long-term storage possibilities, as illustrated by the 200-megawatt load recorded in real-time on Thursday, June 4, 2026, in the middle of the day. While NHPC ensures initial transport via a dedicated 225-kilovolt line over a distance of 51 kilometers to the Nyom II connection node, the technical responsibility for distribution then falls under the jurisdiction of other corporate entities. The network congestion occurs at the level of intermediate transformation stations, national transport lines, and proximity distribution networks, which are unable to absorb the additional injected loads.
Unblocking the Cameroonian energy crisis now requires a systemic arbitration that goes beyond the simple framework of engineering. The sector's governance suffers from a lack of fine operational coordination between the independent producer NHPC, the public transporter Sonatrel, and the operator in charge of final distribution, whose role is to plan the call of power plants according to the users' load curve. The material vulnerability of the equipment is added to the financial peril linked to the accumulation of unpaid bills throughout the value chain, a precarious treasury situation that threatens the operation and maintenance plan of the production facilities in the long term. The future balance of the sector depends on the strengthening of transmission infrastructure and a global financial restructuring of the electricity sector.
Ndjomo Carlos
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