Online Reporter
WHILE great strides over the past year to build up the reliability of Zimbabwe’s generation and transmission of electricity, reflected in the absence of load shedding while the consumers continue to increase as economic growth accelerates, it is clear that a lot more power generation will be needed to maintain that growth.
Most estimates see that Zimbabwe must more than double generation capacity to 6 000MW by 2030, and most of this will have to come within the country as Southern Africa as a whole is also moving forward fast and there is highly unlikely to be much in the way of spare capacity for imports.
The regional power pool will basically be there to help balance the load and provide flexibility, rather than feed vast amounts of power into the pool for Zimbabwean factories and mines and farmers to tap.
This is already happening. Zimbabwe imports and exports roughly the same amount of power, importing during our peak periods but able to export in slack times when others need extra.
The other important point is that this expansion in generation has to be continuous over the years. We need to be adding hundreds of megawatts a year, every year.
So there is no single magic solution, and almost certainly no single source for the new generation. Rather it will be built up by adding extra generation from a wide variety of sources and a collection of new power stations large and small.
At present, around 12 percent of Zimbabwe’s electrical energy comes from private power producers, a significant addition to the national demand.
This percentage will be rising thanks to our pro-investment policy, a sensible regulator, a willingness for longer-term supply contracts, and a high rate of economic growth that guarantees a market for these investors.
Now the Government has made it clear with its latest set of regulations, the ones defining what power sources investors may use. The list is meant to be exhaustive including every potential source: Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, biogas, water which is basically hydro-power, coal bed methane, coal, petroleum products including gas, ethanol, waste to energy and even nuclear. About the only source missing is tidal and that only because we have no ocean frontage.
This means that anyone seeking to invest in Zimbabwean power and can put together the finance and other practical requirements including the environmental will get a licence. Some of the sources require a large power station to be viable; others can be of almost any size. We can plug them all in.
Other policies, and these days costing considerations and business viability, place an emphasis on renewable sources of new generation. For over a year now solar, and where there are strong persistent winds then wind turbines, have been in capital terms the cheapest to build from scratch. The gap is growing, so the world is now in that position where renewable energy is the most obvious new source. Hydro is in the same category, if existing infrastructure is in place to get the required flows.
But this does not mean dumping what is there. Zimbabwe’s largest power station is Hwange Thermal with eight units ranging from 120MW to 300MW. The station is there and will increasingly anchor the grid as new, probably renewable capacity is added.
Indeed a good part of the next few hundred megawatts, needed over the next 12 months, will come from the continuing progress of renovating the older six units at Hwange, replacing worn out equipment and cleaning up the rest.
At the same time, a number of modest private solar schemes will be coming on line, plus the first phase of the large floating solar array on Lake Kariba. A modest contribution is due soon from the Geo-Pomona waste-to-energy station and a couple of min-hydro stations on large irrigation dams.
Meanwhile, we need to be working at Zesa and with our willing investors the next set of additions to our capacity, making sure that as we need the extra generation it will be there, ready to be commissioned and fed into the grid.
The coal bed methane at Lupane has been a possibility for some years and can be brought into use quite quickly, for example. At some stage natural gas in Muzarabani will power a decent-sized power station.
What matters is not so much as what is generated at each station or by each unit at a large station, but what the total is. And that means that small, medium and large stations can all happily co-exist and all add to the growing total of capacity.
One useful result of the new regulations for broadening the sources of Zimbabwean power is the greater security that arises when we keep fewer eggs in each basket.
At present our largest generators, the two latest additions at Hwange, each supply over 10 percent of the total load. One result of broadening generation while increasing the amount generated will mean that no single unit or single source will supply say more than 5 percent.
This means that when a unit has to be taken down for maintenance, or gets cut off by a transmission fault, or hit by climate change, we just carry on. So we win twice with more power, but also greater security of continuous power.
