The Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) has announced that the 300MW Hwange Unit 7 has been temporarily removed from the grid for system evaluation before the final commissioning phase.
In a statement seen by Pindula News, the Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company said the unit will be online in a few days. Reads the statement:
We would like to advise our valued Stakeholders that the Hwange Unit 7 which is still undergoing commissioning tests has successfully completed the reliability run.
Engineers have taken it off the grid for evaluation of all systems in preparation of the final phase of commissioning (performance guarantees test).
This entails temporary removal of 300MW from the grid resulting in our customers not enjoying the general power stability that had been obtaining in the past days.
The unit is expected back online within the next few days. Any inconveniences are sincerely regretted.
Hwange Thermal Power Station’s Unit 7 was synchronised and began feeding electricity into the national grid on March 20. The synchronisation was successful, and 41MW of electricity was fed into the grid 20 minutes after the process began.
The unit is expected to reach its installed capacity of 300MW by June this year.
Zimbabwe is expanding the Hwange power station with two 300MW units – Units 7 and 8 – funded mainly by China. The Zimbabwe Power Company (ZPC) expects Unit 8 to generate power in October.
On Wednesday, May 10, three power stations – Harare (11MW), Kariba (586MW), and Hwange (326MW) – were generating a total of 923MW, according to ZPC.
The company also reported that on Thursday (today), the three above, out of five power stations, were generating a total of 853MW. Harare
was generating 11MW, Kariba (522MW) while Hwange was generating 320MW.
According to the Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC), the estimated electricity demand at peak in Zimbabwe is around 1 800MW.