Almost 75 pct of Cambodia's villages have access to electricity: minister
Xinhua, January 30, 2017 Adjust font size:
Cambodian Minister of Mines and Energy Suy Sem said on Monday that 74.7 percent, or 10,589 villages of the country's total villages, now have access to electricity.
"The government has been encouraging the expansion of national grid and expects that all villages in Cambodia will have electricity by 2020," he said during the annual conference of the Electricity Authority of Cambodia (EAC).
EAC's chairman Ty Norin said some 1.91 million houses, or 58.2 percent of the country's total houses, had electric power connected by the end of last year.
He said the electricity supply available in 2016 was 2,008 megawatts, including 1,592 megawatts taken from hydropower plants, coal-fired power plants, oil-fueled power plants, and solar power plants, and 416 megawatts imported from Vietnam, Thailand and Laos.
According to the EAC's 2016 report, six Chinese-invested hydropower plants had produced a total of 927 megawatts last year, representing 46.1 percent of the electricity available in Cambodia. Endit