Ongoing efforts to support MEMD Uganda with data-driven energy investments
Permanent Secretary Engr. Irene Bateebe with Professor Vijay Modi
On Friday, June 27, I met with Engr. Irene Bateebe, Permanent Secretary (PS) of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development (MEMD) in Entebbe. We reported on our new effort to address a request to support planning and investment preparation for two refugee districts, Obongi and Madi Okollo. The PS remarked that the effort had high fidelity and could be of value to the Ministry writ large, especially entities such as EASP, UEDCL and UECCC. We hope to continue to provide investment planning support which was initiated through the Columbia World Projects initiative “Utilizing Data to Catalyze Investments”. We demonstrated a data platform that they could use to maintain/update if they so wished. We handed to the PS three summary briefs during this meeting.
The PS was excited to have created a research, innovation and investment working group that would report to her, and centralize ways that all stakeholders could nimbly update and use data.
One current use in the short-term is to prioritize cost-effective grid expansion and intensification in the vicinity of the grid, ensuring that productive load considerations are taken into account. Such information has already been used by MEMD and private sector for their recent mini-grid call for proposals. The PS also saw value to UECCC and off-grid solar home systems. We are currently working through discussions on how to institutionalize these tools as we move forward. Agriculture and Water commissioners were involved from a very early stage and would find the irrigation report helpful. A lean data platform is available to visualize some of the information in the reports.
The survey tools used are on the laboratory website along with the approaches to cost-effective field data collection for loads difficult to identify using satellite imagery.
Some implementation and research briefs we shared with the PS at the links below: