Congo’s Katanga region is famous for its booming mining sector but it has a big electricity problem.

According to Bloomberg, the Africa’s largest copper producer and world’s largest miner of cobalt — used in rechargeable batteries, has only installed power-generating capacity of about 2,500 megawatts, but only half of this is functioning.

Power generation and distribution in the DRC is in the hands of inefficient state-owned Societe Nationale de l’Electricite (SNEL).

Poor power distribution by SNEL is costing miners in Katanga over 50,000 metric ton in production each year.

It’s with this background that Eric Monga, an entrepreneur and regional head of the Federation des Entreprises du Congo , a business lobby group known as the FEC, decided to build two hydroelectric power plants and supply electricity to miners.

FEC signed a memorandum of understanding with the Congolese government in September for the development of two sites in Haut-Katanga province at a cost of about $300 million.

The plants will produce about 95 megawatts once completed.

“Power is the solution for Katanga and for the rest of the Congo,” Monga told Bloomberg. “More Congolese should be investing in it.”

Congo has been trying to develop the Inga complex on the Congo River, which the World Bank says could eventually produced 50,000 megawatts, but the size and cost of the project has proven challenging.

In the meantime, Monga says smaller power plants like FEC’s will be vital to address the energy shortage that miners and congolese households need.

“The province’s energy potential is huge, whatever the electricity source, be it biomass or something else. However, due to insufficient output, we import electricity to feed the mining sector,” Monga wrote in an investor brief he posted on The Free Library.

Jean-Bosco Kayombo, a member of the Chamber’s Energy Commission, told a  conference in Katanga in October that copper processing facilities in the region experience as many as 150 power supply interruptions a month.