ZESA Says Country Getting Full Electricity During Christmas |

— ZimEye (@ZimEye) December 24, 2022

More lights will be on over Christmas as power supplies have improved significantly, with load-shedding reduced after Zesa Holdings managed to buy an additional 150MW from Electricidade de Moçambique, taking imports from that supplier up to 200MW, and complete repairs on Hwange Units 5 and 6, the larger of the old units.
In a statement, Zesa’s stakeholder relations said customers will not experience, during the festive period, the aggressive load curtailment they have been experiencing in the past few weeks after output at Kariba South was cut sharply to run-of-river after stored flood waters were exhausted, faults at Hwange Thermal meant only two units of the six units were running, and a general shortage of regional capacity made imports difficult.

“This development follows weeks of depressed generation attributed to the dropping water levels at Lake Kariba which necessitated the directive to reduce power generation at Kariba South Power Station by the Zambezi River Authority,” said Zesa.

“Moreover, the incessant breakdown of the aged Hwange Power Station equipment saw the station operating with two units during the period. The current power generation challenges affecting the region affected electricity trading on the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP) market, further reducing import arrangements in the face of exponential demand for power in the country.

“Our engineers and technicians have been working frantically to ensure increased power generation. Consequently, we have increased generation at the Hwange Power Station by getting the broken down units back up, resulting in 5 of the 6 being currently operational which has increased supply to the national grid.”

Along with the rise in local generation and the increased imports from Mozambique, following the Government making the required foreign currency available, there is an expected cut in demand with a swathe of business on its annual maintenance shut-down and reduced demand in other sectors.

“In the past weeks, we have been extensively engaging with various stakeholders so as to implement critical measures to alleviate the power deficit challenges,” said Zesa, noting that the deficit was common to most SADC countries. But there was extra capacity in Mozambique which Zesa has managed to tap.

“We have successfully managed to secure the injection of additional imports from other SAPP members to support supply until the Kariba reservoir recovers in the first quarter of next year.

“We would like to express our profound gratitude for the support and commitment we got from the Government to mobilise the much needed foreign currency.”

Finance and Economic Development Minister Professor Mthuli Ncube told Parliament last week he had made US$34 million available to boost and pay for needed imports.

Zesa has also been working with its largest customers, those who pay for their maximum power demand rather than buy units of energy as domestic and other businesses do. This allows these customers, mainly the largest mines and some of the largest industries, to import directly.

So Zesa worked with them to intensely facilitate the establishment of an Intensive Energy User Group (IEUG) with to guarantee supplies to maximum demand customers and ease pressure on the grid, said the statement.

Besides importing directly, Zesa said these customers could support the development of independent power producers in Zimbabwe by signing supply agreements directly with them. For both the direct imports by very large users and those buying directly from the independents, Zesa just provides the grid to bring the power from the supplier to teh customer.

The first meeting of this IEUG of major users was held on March 29 this year and there have been engagement meetings in Zambia and Mozambique since then.

“We are now pushing that we move faster on this initiative as it is in line with global developments where the private sector is involved more and more in developing and securing power supplies.

“As a sign of progression and commitment, during the current crisis some of the members of this group offered to resource the utility with advance payments of their electricity usage bills to enable us to meet our power import obligations, and to date one such transaction has already been implemented.”

The next main step is to bring the pair of new generating units at Hwange Extension on line, with their extra 600MW. Tests at Hwange 7 should soon be complete, to be followed soon after by Hwange 8, and senior Zesa staff have joined other technical staff and the resident power station staff and are staying at Hwange over the festive season to keep the commissioning momentum going.

“The two units were originally expected to supply the grid from early this year. But the delays caused by Covid-19 derailed the completion. But “commissioning preparations are well on course”, Zesa said.—- Herald