Zambia announces 12-hour load shedding schedules
Brian Rungano Temba
Zambian National Power Utility ZESCO has announced that it will be increasing load shedding hours, as the neigbouring country tries to manage worsening power challenges.
The announcement, flies in the face of activists who tried to frame Zambia as an exception when other countries started experiencing power shortages.
In a statement, released by the ZESCO Corporate Affairs Department, the longer hours are a product of dropping water levels.
This is also coupled by the outage of supporting generators at their local collieries.
“The Corporation’s ability to meet power demand remains constrained by the drastic reduction in available water in the Kariba reservoiur for the electricity generation at Kariba North Bank Power Station. At Present the power station’s generations capacity has been reduced from its installed 1080 Megawatts to below 400 Megawatts.
Furthermore, the 150 MW generator outage at Maamba Collieries Limited Power Plant for routine annual maintenance from January 4 until January 20, 2023has exacerbated the station,” read the statement.
Experts have claimed that Zambia’s worsening power shortage has only joined ESCOM (South Africa) and ZESA (Zimbabwe) now due to their low Industrial demand of power, however it was inevitable.
Zimbabwe faces the same predicament of Zimbabwe faced in early December 2022 when their ration of water from the Zambezi River Authorities had depleted.
Zimbabwean Government has since made efforts to address the power outages while Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (ZERA) has reported an increase in Investors applications in Power Generations.
Most of which are Green Energy Solar plants.
Zimbabwe`s Meteorological Department has announced that they expect the dry spell to recede as torrential rains are expected to hit parts of Zimbabwe From January 6 to January 8 2023 in Mashonaland, Manicaland, Midlands and Masvingo Provinces.
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