The Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) on Tuesday 27 September 2022 announced that Zimbabwe had experienced a national blackout as of 1030 hrs.
The local power utility said the blackouts were a result of a loss of power on the national grid.
The authority said it had established that the Hwange Power Station had tripped out adding that efforts were underway to restore the national grid. Said ZESA in a statement:
Kindly note that we have experienced a National Blackout as at 1030hrs this morning.
We will advise on changes.
Apologies for the downtime.
The blackouts come barely days after the Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC), a ZESA subsidiary warned members of the public to brace for increased load-shedding which was attributed to technical challenges being experienced at Kariba and Hwange Power Stations as well as import constraints.
The crisis is expected to take some time considering that one of the biggest suppliers of electricity, Eskom, South Africa’s power utility, is failing to generate power enough to meet local demand.
Industrialists actually believe that the situation might get worse if South Africa moves to purchase electricity from neighbouring countries as that will result in power prices going up.
Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce (ZNCC) president Mike Kamungeremu recently said the country needs to quickly focus on its own power generation, as power shortages in South Africa threaten local industry.
Meanwhile, ZESA says Kariba’s two generating units that are being constructed have the capacity to generate 300MW of power while Hwange will see two more units being added with a combined capacity of 600MW.
This still would only narrow Zimbabwe’s power deficit of between 1 000MW and 1 600MW.