The energy crisis in Uganda has caused a sharp decline in the growth of the industry sector from 10.8% to 4.5% between 2004/5 and 2005/6. This crisis has escalated the power disruptions, which have had adverse effects on various sectors. While business owners have resorted to importation of fossil fuel generators that have increased the cost of production, others have resorted to battery energy storage systems to cater for short outages, which are limited in life span, depth of discharge, among others. These interventions have, thus, further increased the cost of goods and services. In addition, the rural populations using solar home systems incur high battery maintenance and replacement costs. In this paper an electromechanical flywheel battery is proposed as a better alternative in mitigating energy storage problems. It is found that by replacing the battery storage systems with the electromechanical flywheel battery, a saving of up to 35% on cost of energy can be made in the solar home systems and for the industry sector, the power disruptions could be reduced.
Abstract. Electricity theft is the main source of non-technical losses in electricity distribution utilities. This paper presents data from an ongoing research to study the causes of electricity theft in Kampala, Uganda and people's response to the efforts being made to reduce it. Our study reveals that electricity theft in Kampala is largely due to economic reasons and corruption within the utility company. It confirms that people perceive electricity theft as the utility's problem and are not willing to report electric theft suspects. We propose ICT technologies to encourage consumer participation in reducing electricity theft.
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