Construction is pushing ahead at pace on Angola’s Caculo Cabaça Hydropower Project, a massive 2,172 megawatt facility on the Kwanza River that is set to become the country’s largest single source of electricity once complete, as workers actively pour concrete for the main dam structure and push the nation’s green power ambitions forward.
Located approximately 250 kilometres east of the capital, Luanda, in Kwanza Norte Province, the run-of-the-river facility is being developed by Angola’s Ministry of Energy and Water at a total estimated investment of approximately $4.53 billion, with construction being carried out by Chinese contractor China Gezhouba Group Corporation. The scale of the undertaking is considerable: the project involves a 103-metre-high concrete dam with a crest length of 553 metres, creating a reservoir stretching up to 16.3 kilometres and inundating an area of 16.6 square kilometres, with a storage capacity of 440 million cubic metres.
Beneath the dam, an underground powerhouse measuring 221 metres long, 26.5 metres wide and 68 metres high will house four 530 megawatt Francis turbines alongside a fifth, smaller 52 megawatt ecological unit, fed by four concrete-lined headrace tunnels. Recent months have brought significant milestones on the project, including the completion in June 2025 of a critical water discharge tunnel, described by the project manager as removing a major hurdle for the installation of generating units and the storage of water for power generation. In May of the previous year, President João Lourenço personally authorised the provisional diversion of the Kwanza River, a step he described as an important milestone for the continuation of works on the project.
Upon completion, expected around October 2026 with commissioning to follow in 2028, Caculo Cabaça will surpass the 2,070 megawatt Laúca hydroelectric station to become Angola’s biggest hydroelectric facility, generating an estimated 8,123 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually. The plant will feed directly into the Southern African Power Pool, reinforcing regional energy security, while Angolan officials have set a broader target of lifting national generation capacity from 6.4 to 9 gigawatts by 2027, aided by Caculo Cabaça alongside the smaller Baynes hydropower project on the Namibian border.
The project forms part of a wider continental push towards electrification, as African nations increasingly turn to large-scale hydropower to close persistent energy gaps and support industrialisation, positioning Angola as an emerging leader in the region’s renewable energy transition.