"The world has never truly undergone an energy transition... Instead, the world has experienced a series of energy additions, where new fuels build atop the old, rising like a skyscraper under construction for more than 200 years." media.rff.org/documents/RF...

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Biruk Terrefe Emanuele Fantini Luca Puddu & Edegilign Hailu fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/...

Delays and inefficiency meant that many infrastructure projects failed to deliver promised benefits. Moreover, the political crisis of the past decade and the civil war since 2020 have left Abiy Ahmed’s government battling political and debt crisis to finally complete the GERD

Related problems affect distribution, with the result that industrial and domestic users lack reliable connections, while the majority of the population lack any electricity connection. Indeed, grid expansion and connections are likely to lag behind generation for many years

This reflects a general process since the mid-2000s whereby the political leadership pressed for ever larger dams and electricity generation capacity in line with growing developmental ambitions and industrial plans, but in doing so bypassed technical input into decision making

But there is insufficient water in the annual flow of the Blue Nile to run all the GERD's turbines at full power for more than about one-third of the time. The result is a rather expensive means of generating electricity

2. the political nature of Ethiopia's dam planning that largely bypassed technical input. Repeated Ethiopian dams (GG3, Beles, Koysha) have maximised installed capacity at the insistence of political leaders. The GERD is only the largest and most high profile example

1. the adversarial hydropolitics of the Nile. Egypt has repeatedly sought to block upstream dam development. The Ethiopian hope was that one massive dam capturing as much water as possible would put an end to endless negotiations with downstream riparians

The GERD combines all the water storage and electricity generation capacity of a three-dam cascade into one massive dam located close to the Sudanese border, at the last possible location within Ethiopia. Why? Two main reasons

When Egypt and Sudan withdrew, Ethiopia was in a position to act unilaterally and began to plan a Nile dam. Yet when the GERD was announced in 2011 it was a very different dam from those proposed by the US study in 1964 or the NBI studies more recently