Online Reporter
ZESA Holdings has reached the milestone of 115 days without load-shedding, a dramatic improvement on past performance, partly fed by improved generation, partly by private sector investment especially in the ferrochrome smelting sector, and partly by the ability to pay for imports totalling around 350MW.
But, as Zesa and the Government both admit, there is a long way to go before every household in Zimbabwe has at least a basic electricity supply while the growing demands of farmers, miners and industrialists continue to need new sources of generation.
Part of the clean-up that produced the present positive position was financial, getting the tariff structure right after a decade of losses through using a recommended model that did not perform as expected.
This at least means Zesa makes money from every unit of electricity it sells or buys from private producers. Presumably the transfer of Zesa to the Mutapa Investment Fund helped in this process of getting the finances sorted out.
Secondly there has been conversion of theoretical participation from the private sector into some highly practical arrangements. One major example highlighted by Zesa is the captive power plants in the ferrochrome sector.
Captive power means the electricity user, the ferrochrome smelters in this case, are generating their own power. But because of the interconnections and fairly complex arrangements, the smelter companies can sell power to Zesa, presumably at peak periods.
In return, they are given a special lower rate, presumably at off peak times when Zesa itself has a surplus, and by cutting costs through more efficient generation can still do the deal without losing money.
Zesa sees a lot more scope for similar deals, right down to the fairly small solar installations many households on the grid now have installed, where it can buy power in the daytime, when users are not using much, and sell power in the evenings and night to the same users. More structured deals are possible with a lot of larger businesses with their own captive power, usually using a lot of solar panels.
One important development in the last couple of years has been the cost of solar and wind power now falling below the cost of equivalent coal-fired thermal. This is now driving the green revolution in power supplies, despite some opposition from those who want to maintain high percentages of coal and oil power.
There are plans now for large solar power stations, plus the continual work already in progress of the more modest business installations linked through the smart net metering that allows businesses to sell surpluses when they have them and buy grid power when they need it.
Solar power is driving rural electrification in Zimbabwe, through mini-grids and household installations, as well as the continual, but relatively slower, extension of the national grid.
Admittedly most household installations cannot produce or store enough power for cooking and water heating. So we seeing the slightly odd position that while we are lighting up homes, and practical plans see 300 000 households a year being lit up so everyone has lights by 2030, a large majority of rural people, and a slice of urban dwellers living off grid, still use firewood and charcoal.
This challenge is being addressed, but progress is slower, reliant on extending the national grid or making liquid petroleum gas more readily available in remoter areas at affordable prices.
Zesa’s distribution arm, the Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company, soon to be rebundled with the generation arm back into a unified Zesa, has listed continuing problems over the vandalism of infrastructure, and some users not paying or delaying payment of bills with the resultant limited cash flow.
Households and smaller businesses will be startled to hear that it is possible to delay payments or not make payments, since they are all on prepaid meters. Zesa will have a lot of support if it can either find a way those on the very complex industrial tariffs can be on some sort of pay-as-you-go scheme, or are at least cut off if their payments are late.
The approach to vandalism has been centred on raising the minimum prison terms for vandals, to 10 years now. The trouble is hardly anyone is ever caught so the risks are deemed acceptable. Some progress is being made by getting consumer groups to build better protection for substations and other infrastructure. But until we have CCTV cameras pointed at every transformer we still have the threat.
Since a copper bar is a copper bar, and thieves can melt down their copper cables into bars, perhaps we need to add small amounts of labelling alloys or isotopes to the Zesa copper, now Zesa is making a lot of its own transformers and other equipment, so it is easier to prove that a copper bar contains stolen copper.
Obviously as the grid extends we need to be able to keep the thieves off it, and maintenance, especially on an extended grid, will become more urgent. So this problem needs a workable solution.
But Zesa’s progress has been remarkable, and more to the point, the investment plans and other measures are accelerating this progress.
