The world will have seen nothing like it. It is being hailed as the holy grail for power, the biggest hydroelectric project ever built that would harness sub-Saharan Africa's greatest river and light up half of the continent. But will the ambitious plan to tame the mighty Congo River, a mega-project first conceived in the 1970s, finally get going and what will be its actual impact? Last month, the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo announced in Paris that the construction of the first phase of a new set of energy projects at the country's Inga Falls would begin in October 2015. The new $12 billion development, dubbed Inga 3, is expected to have a power output of nearly 4,800 megawatts (MW), with South Africa agreeing to buy half of the electricity generated.
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DR Congo moving ahead with plans to build the world's biggest hydroelectric project
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When complete, Grand Inga could have a massive capacity of 40,000 megawatts
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Project construction will begin in October 2015
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But critics argue that the project will only serve the mining firms and not benefit the rural poor
"They've started, they've made a commitment to proceed on the basis that @placeholder will take a huge amount of the power, but getting from here to there it's just a very long road," he adds.