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India’s Water and Power Consultancy Services (WAPCOS) has completed 25 percent of the upgrade works on the Zimbabwe Power Company’s Deka Pipeline Water Project, a senior company official said. ZPC’s Hwange Thermal Power Station operations director Engineer Joshua Chirikutsi said during the tour of the project last week that all refurbishments to the old pipeline have been completed.
“Local works are done, what’s left is the engineering procurement and construction tender, which is being done in India,” said Eng. Chirikutsi. “This (Deka) is our sole source of water, without it everything stops, we can’t do anything,” he said.
The works are part of the $28 million upgrade project for the Deka Pipeline’s low and high lift pumps, which enables ZPC to draw water from Zambezi River to its power plant.
The water is used to generate steam used for cooling purposes at the thermal power plant. Eng Chirikutsi said without the water nothing happens at the plant with regards to generation of electricity.
The local upgrades, he said, entailed repairing of the Deka Pump Station’s valves among other refurbishments to the infrastructure.
The remaining 75 percent of the upgrades will entail laying of a second water pipeline from the Zambezi River to the power utility’s thermal power station in Hwange.
The new pipeline is meant to increase water supply to the power plant ahead of its capacity extension from current average production potential of 500 megawatts by a further 600MW.
The tender for this capacity extension project was awarded to Chinese firm Sino Hydro, which has also been contracted to extend ZPC’s 750MW Kariba South Hydro Power Station by 300MW.
ZPC’s Hwange Thermal Power Station had design production capacity of 920MW, but is now only able to generate an average of 500MW due to the fact that the plant has gone past its normal useful life.
A few years ago ZPC had to enter an agreement with Namibian power utility Nampower to give the plant a capacity and facelift to improve its reliability as it had become prone to frequent breakdowns.
Engineer Chirikutsi said the works for the remaining Deka Pipeline project upgrades have been put to tender in India, where the funding was sourced, from its Eximbank.
The government, through ZPC, is working on several projects to increase power supply to close the gap between demand of 2200MW at peak periods and current production capacity of 1050MW.
Online Reporter