However, no lenders at that meeting made a firm commitment to invest in the project, which will take six years to complete.

The Congo also has yet to identify a project developer, although three international consortia have expressed interest. They include China’s Sinohydro and Three Gorges Corp.; Spain’s Actividades de Construcción y Servicios (ACS), Eurofinsa and AEE; and South Korea’s Daewoo and Posco with Canada’s SNC-Lavalin.

The involved global lenders have provided funding for preliminary Inga III designs and to engineer upgrades of the existing Inga I and Inga II dam structures, but there has been no financial commitment for the actual construction of the work.

Analysts speculate that new efforts to revive the project will not succeed because of a lack of government commitment in the past and increasing insecurity caused by civil conflict between the administration of President Joseph Kabila and several rebel groups.

Dam Projects' Troubled History

Analysts also say the delayed World Bank-funded rehab of Inga I and Inga II and the failure to compensate millions of people who were displaced during construction of those two dams decades ago indicate how risky investing in Inga III could be.

The Inga I and Inga II rehab projects, initially slated for 2003 at a cost of $200 million, involves turbine replacement and refurbishment, construction of a second transmission line to Kinshasa and rehabilitation of the Inga-Kolwezi grid, which operates at 25% of capacity. The rehab and new transmission-line projects now are estimated to cost $883 million.

“It does not make sense that [the Congo] failed for over 10 years to complete rehabilitation of Inga I and [Inga] II yet now expects to manage a bigger and more complex project,” says Rudo Sanyanga, Africa director of the global environmental group International Rivers.

Roman Grynberg, a senior research fellow at the Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis, says that, despite the push to integrate regional electricity supply by developing Inga III, it is far from certain whether the Congo can execute the $12-billion project.

In 2007, the country partnered with metals giant BHP Billiton to construct a world-class $5-billion aluminum smelter and a $3.5- billion, 2,500-MW hydro-power project by 2018.

But the company abandoned both projects and said it was withdrawing from the agreement, citing economic difficulties.