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A 30-metre dome at Morupule B reveals the infrastructure gaps holding back Africa’s power grids and the South African scaffolders filling them. Botswana’s energy crisis doesn’t fit the usual narrative. There’s no shortage of coal at the Morupule B Power Station, the country sits on substantial reserves. The problem is simpler and more maddening: rain.
Wet coal burns inefficiently. It clogs equipment, reduces power output and turns what should be reliable baseload generation into an unpredictable lottery dependent on weather patterns. The solution taking shape at Morupule B is equally straightforward: a 30-metre high, 140 metre wide dome to keep the coal dry. It’s the kind of unglamorous infrastructure fix that rarely makes headlines but directly determines whether lights stay on.
South African specialists Uni-span’s involvement illustrates a quieter reality of African infrastructure development: the supply chains, technical expertiseand specialised equipment often still flow from established industrial hubs to emerging projects across borders. Working alongside Mendel Welding Engineering and Sky Bridge Engineering, Uni-span deployed over 90 access towers with some reaching the full 30-metre height of the dome itself to enable safe installation of the massive steel frame. It’s temporary infrastructure building permanent infrastructure, the construction equivalent of scaffolding holding up the scaffolding.
The technical challenge isn’t trivial. A dome of this scale requires precision engineering where millimetre-level accuracy matters across a 140 metre span. Workers need stable, accessible platforms at heights where wind loading becomes a genuine safety concern. Get the scaffolding wrong and the entire installation timeline collapses. Botswana’s power supply challenges mirror those across much of sub-Saharan Africa: ageing infrastructure, underinvestment in maintenance and a gap between installed generation capacity and reliable output. Morupule B, commissioned in 2012, has faced persistent operational problems that periodically plunge the country into load-shedding.
A coal storage dome won’t solve systemic power sector governance issues or fund major plant upgrades. What it can do is address one specific, fixable problem: fuel degradation from exposure to elements. By improving combustion efficiency and reducing equipment wear from moisture-laden coal, the facility edges Botswana closer to extracting the power generation it’s theoretically already paid for. The dome represents infrastructure pragmatism not the transformative renewable energy projects that dominate development finance headlines but the grinding, practical fixes that determine whether existing assets actually function.
Uni-span frames its involvement as “supporting Botswana’s development” and “driving progress across the continent,” language that positions the company as development partner rather than commercial contractor. Fair enough, infrastructure expertise is infrastructure expertise, regardless of where it originates. But the project also highlights questions about regional technical capacity. Could Botswana-based scaffolding specialists have managed a project of this scale? Is the South African involvement a temporary capability gap that will close as Botswana’s construction sector develops or a permanent feature of regional industrial ecosystems where specialised expertise clusters in certain hubs?
There’s no obvious answer, and perhaps the question matters less than the outcome: Morupule B gets its dome, Botswana’s grid gets marginally more reliable and southern African construction supply chains demonstrate they can mobilise for major projects across borders. The timing carries a certain irony. As development finance institutions pour billions into renewable energy across Africa, Botswana is building infrastructure to optimise fossil fuel combustion. It’s a reminder that energy transitions aren’t linear narratives from coal to solar, they’re messy, overlapping realities where countries simultaneously invest in cleaner futures whilst shoring up present-day power supplies that still depend on thermal generation.
For workers assembling 90 access towers in the Botswana heat, the grand energy transition debate is somewhat academic. The immediate task is ensuring the dome goes up safely, on schedule and to specification. Everything else like national energy security, regional development, cross-border collaboration flows from getting those fundamentals right. The dome won’t revolutionise Botswana’s power sector. It will simply make the coal burn better. Sometimes that’s precisely the infrastructure intervention a grid actually needs.
