The partnership that built Mwadingusha was not one company but three: the Societe generale africaine d'electricite, the Societe generale des forces hydroelectriques du Katanga, and the Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga. The last was the giant. Union Miniere controlled most of Katanga's mining output and needed electricity more than it needed anything else. Copper smelting consumes colossal amounts of power, and diesel generators in 1930s Africa were expensive and unreliable. The Lufira River offered a more elegant solution. Dam it, run the water through turbines, string wires to the smelters. The resulting system tied the entire mining economy of southern Katanga to one spinning set of rotors a few hundred kilometers north. For the colonial operators this was efficiency. For the region, it locked power generation and mineral extraction into a single circuit that post-independence governments would struggle to pull apart.

Each of the original turbines was rated at 11.8 megawatts, giving the station a nameplate capacity of 71 megawatts. Design margins in the 1920s were generous, and the machinery was overbuilt to a degree modern engineers find almost touching. That is part of why it lasted. The other part is that maintenance in DRC during the 1990s and early 2000s was a matter of keeping what you had running, because replacing it was not possible. SNEL, the Congolese national electricity company, kept the lights on with gasketed patches and scavenged parts. By the time the rehabilitation project began in 2016, the turbines were operating well below their original rating, and the grid they fed was chronically short of power.

Rebuilding Mwadingusha required partners SNEL could not have assembled alone. Ivanhoe Mines, a Canadian firm developing the vast Kamoa-Kakula copper project about 250 kilometers southwest, needed electricity to move the ore it hoped to produce. It agreed to finance the refurbishment in exchange for access to the output. The engineering contract went to a consortium of Andritz AG of Austria, which builds hydro equipment, and Cegelec of France, a Vinci Energies subsidiary that handles electrical installation. Originally four of the six turbines were targeted. New Francis turbines rated at 13.05 megawatts each were manufactured in Europe and shipped in. Valves, inverters, voltage regulators, exciters, and stabilizers, almost everything electrical inside the plant, got replaced. When the work wrapped in 2021, all six turbines had been upgraded, raising the plant's capacity from 71 to 78.3 megawatts.

Mwadingusha sits about 120 kilometers north of Lubumbashi, the provincial capital. The power it generates still flows primarily to mining, though now the customers include Ivanhoe's new operations as well as Gecamines' older smelters. SNEL takes the balance and feeds it into the national grid. Congolese households in a country with chronically inadequate electrification benefit indirectly, as every additional megawatt on the grid eases the shortages elsewhere. The story of Mwadingusha tracks the story of Katanga itself: built by colonial capital for colonial profit, nationalized by Mobutu, neglected through decades of state collapse, then revived through a partnership between a state utility and a foreign mining investor. The turbines spinning today are newer and stronger than the ones that started in 1930. The fundamental equation, water and ore and wire, has not changed.