Main contractor: Jacobsen Elektro AS from Norway

Design: Power Engineers (USA and South Africa)

Turbines and generators are made by Siemens. They are three each of them nominal 34MW, but can relatively easily be enlarged a bit.

Subcontractors: Civil works are done by Caspian, mechanical works by CSI and electrical works by Bati. Those companies are local companies and manned mostly by locals.

Today there are two Icelanders working at the Ubungo site, the brothers Kristjan and Runar Fridgeirsson, both employees of Verkfrædistofa Sudurlands which is a part of EFLA consulting engineers. Originally they were hired to be civil supervisors at the site, but soon it became apparent that the design of the plant was lacking in many aspects and had to be amended, and detail drawings were missing for the most part. Runar made a new design for the switch yard, because the original design did not fit in the area and had it been built according to the original drawings, 132 kV overhead lines would be laying on top of the bus-bars. All underground cables, sleeves and drainage pipes had to be designed, within the power-plant area. The trouble with that is that they had to accommodate: high voltage cables, medium voltage cables, 400V cables, sleeves for all kinds of control cables, with a fire-water pipes, and drainage plus an earthing- grid. Buried in the area were also already two gas pipes (location not exactly known) as well as 220kV power cables. Now they have issued more than 100 drawings and are today doing the as-built drawings for Power engineers, which is quite some job because the original drawings were to a degree lacking and also because a the amount of people have been working on the project and have made changes which now have to be documented.

Now it is expected the " first smoke" will be seen next Saturday (god willing). First smoke is it called when the turbines are started for the first time. Then it will not be long before they can start to feed the power-hungry national power grid in Tanzania. Today the total production of electricity in Tanzania is around 750 MW (which is less than Kárahnúkar alone) so an addition of 100 MW will be welcome. Especially now as Tanesco is experiencing water shortage at their hydroelectric power plant which is today producing a big share of the total production.

Jacobsen Elektro also has a contract to build another gas-powered plant in the Dar es Salaam area which will be able to produce 150 MW. Depending on financing and on gas supply work will start on that later this year.