12/08/2021
General Electric’s (GE) Power Services business and FieldCore – GE’s customer-focused field services company – announced that they have successfully restarted Metahara Sugar factory; seven months after the plant was severely damaged by a thunderstorm.
As announced by the company on Tuesday, the duo managed to fix the two steam turbines in 20 days, eventually succeeding in bringing 5,000 employees back to their jobs and solving sugar scarcity in the country.
“We lost all hope that these extremely aged units, which were manufactured by Compagnie Electro Mecanique in the 1950s, would never become operational again due to the severity of damage. Hotels and supermarkets had run out of sugar and it was a critical situation. We are glad that the machines are working again,” Fahmi Dawud, Metahara’s deputy manager, said.
GE’s scope of work for this ex*****on included provision of qualified personnel, inspection, servicing, testing and commissioning of the assets, safety and control devices, l**e oil supply, speed reduction gear box, generators, control panels with AVRs as well as cold and hot re-commissioning of the steam turbines.
“GE created a new industrial field services company - FieldCore – to bring together field expertise with more than 10,500 people from Granite Services and GE’s Power Services business into one field Services Company, whose goal is world-class ex*****on for our customers,” Elisee Sezan, general manager, GE’s Power Services business for Sub-Saharan Africa, said.
“We all experienced a great sense of accomplishment when the turbines were revived at startup. This project reflects the passion, the wealth of power generation experience and the world-class service capabilities that keeps GE and FieldCore competitive and consistent around the globe for customers,” he said.
Located in the Oromia Regional State, about 200 km east of Addis Ababa, the Metahara Sugar Factory currently has a production capacity of around 136,000 tons of sugar annually while it has a share of an estimated 20 percent of Ethiopia’s sugar consumption.
Same as Wonji Shoa Sugar Factory, its construction was carried out by HVA Company of the Netherlands. The factory started sugar production in 1970 and is one of the third old sugar mills of the nation that were built during the time of Emperor Haile-Selassie I.
Ethiopia has been facing chronic sugar shortage that has led to public woes eventually leading to protests and the deaths of more than 10 people. However, the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation has repeatedly blamed the scarcity on bad weather to have caused a drop-in production of sugarcane. Therefore, the government was forced to import hundred thousand tons of sugar from Algeria and Thailand to help alleviate the crisis.
The government’s plan for the current fiscal year was to produce about seven million quintals of sugar to fulfill the local demand from the five existing sugar factories and two new sugar factories which were expected to start production. However, the latter two are behind schedule and have not yet commenced.
Citing the prevailing sugar shortage in the country, Daniel Hailu, Executive Country Business Leader for GE Global Growth Organization, on his part said: “It [sugar] is extremely important. Sugar is a key commodity for Ethiopia, both for local consumption and export which helps earnings in foreign currency revenue stream. We are honored that we are able to support the country to remedy this situation and protect its revenue.”
GE Power is a world energy leader that provides technology, solutions and services across the entire energy value chain from the point of generation to consumption.
In 2016, GE opened a 60-capacity permanent office in Addis Ababa and it works with the government, corporate customers and other stakeholders in Ethiopia to support economic growth through infrastructure development in the power, healthcare and transport sectors.
