The Minister of Energy and Power Development, Edgar Moyo has said load shedding is set to ease in the coming days with Hwange Power Station’s Unit 7 expected to resume power generation this week.
In an interview with The Sunday News on Saturday, Moyo said the reduction of demand due to the closure of industries and schools for the festive season will also result in reduced load shedding.
Unit 7 tripped two weeks before it was due for Class C maintenance resulting in longer power cuts.
In an effort to reduce the time-out, the Zimbabwe Power Company (ZPC) had to combine the inspection and repair works of the actual displacement unit with the Class C maintenance which is set to be completed on Tuesday, 28 November.
Minister Moyo also revealed that Unit 8 would be taken off as it was also due for Class C maintenance. He said:
Unit 7 will be synchronised this week by Tuesday or Wednesday following the completion of maintenance works.
After a few days, Unit 8 will be taken off the grid for similar maintenance works.
However, we expect to witness reduced demand for electricity as most industries and schools close for the annual holidays.
As such we want to leverage this to maintain this unit but overall, it should translate to eased load shedding.
Actually, one of the units carrying about 80 megawatts came through, another one will be coming through in a day or two’s time with 120MW.
Speaking to ZTN Prime, recently, Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (ZERA) Board Chairperson David Madzikanda revealed that the power utility ZESA Holdings was financially constrained to import electricity from neighbouring countries. He said:
Generation at Kariba is very much depleted largely because of water inflows. Secondly, we have not been able to import as much as we should be, because if we were importing, we would be filling in the gap.
The other reason is that the old power stations which are which are stations in Harare, Bulawayo and Munyati are currently not running. We are almost at the stage of shutting them down.
The other problem has obviously been to do with the fact that Unit 7 (at Hwange Power Station). For those reasons, we have shortages of power.
Zimbabwe requires 1 850 megawatts per day and on Friday the country was generating 1 285 megawatts, with 41 megawatts coming from independent power producers (IPPs), while Kariba and Hwange were producing 570 megawatts and 674 megawatts respectively.
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