Govt Says The Power Situation To Significantly Improve
The Permanent Secretary for Energy and Power Development, Dr Gloria Magombo has said power supplies are set to normalise from today after almost a week of exceptionally high-level load shedding.
The power transmission and distribution arm of ZESA attributed the prolonged blackouts to breakdowns of four generation units at Hwange Thermal Power Station and a far smaller challenge at Kariba South last weekend.
Speaking on Tuesday 29 September 2022 in the capital after yesterday’s Cabinet meeting, Dr Magombo, said:
The situation which we have had in the past week or so is that we had lost a number of units at Hwange which were due for service.
These are occurrences which have been happening over the past couple of months due to the age of the equipment and we have also had a challenge or two in Kariba. We have managed to restore one of the units back in service. The situation was exaggerated on Tuesday when we had a system fault which took the whole system out which lasted for about four and half hours.
By end of day yesterday, we had two units in Hwange that were in service with about 245MW added to the grid. This still caused serious load shedding because the supply-demand gap was much higher than normal.
We are working on another two units in Hwange, Unit 4 and Unit 2 which will be coming back by Friday (today). By tomorrow we will have at least four units in service in Hwange which will give us almost 400MW and this power shortage will ease and significantly improve the supply situation in the country.
Magombo said a bush fire on the main grid along the Alaska-Warren line Number 2 shut down that line and consequently, a number of other lines were lost including those bringing in imports.
She added:
1). all 7 units in Kariba were restored within four and half hours together with the imports and the independent power producers managed to come in.
2). Units 3 and 4 in Hwange were now firing and feeding the grid.
3). Thermal units took longer to bring up to full output even when repaired.
4). Unit 7 at Hwange was above 95 per cent complete and the commissioning of completed circuits has already started.
5). Unit 7 would be supplying a commercial load of 300MW into the system by November while Unit 8 will be completed by the end of the first quarter of next year.
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