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Business Reporter
ELECTRICITY consumers should brace for increased load shedding as the Zimbabwe Power Company and Mozambique’s Hydro Cahora Bassa have embarked on maintenance programmes of their power plants which will disrupt generation. The ZPC is undertaking a five-month annual maintenance programme of Hwange and Kariba Power stations.
Imports from Mozambique will also decrease to 50 MW from 300 MW from 31 August to 9 September, Zesa said in a statement.
In another statement posted on its website, ZPC said there would be planned outages from 2 September 2013 to 2 February 2014 to facilitate maintenance work at power stations.
As of yesterday, ZPC said power generation capacity stood at 1 292MW with Hwange and Kariba producing 533MW and 680MW respectively while the remainder came from small thermal power stations.
Hwange Thermal Power Station has an installed capacity of 920MW while Kariba Hydro Power Station has 750MW.
Zimbabwe has a national demand of 2 200MW.
During the just-ended winter season, the power company said it managed to generate consistently to cater for the increased demand which was normally experienced during that time of the year.
According to a schedule of the annual maintenance programme, engineers have already started working on Unit 1 at Kariba Power Station.
The work which involves cavitation repairs is expected to be complete on 13 October while the maintenance programme was expected to begin at the plant’s Unit 2 starting from 16 to 29 September.
The programme involves cavitation repairs and generator transformer maintenance.
Work at Hwange Thermal Power Station’s Unit 2 will start from 9 September to 13 October and it involves generator transformer replacement and excitation upgrade.
Turbine repairs and major overhaul at the thermal power station’s Unit 5 is expected to start from 7 October to 2 February 2014.
Zesa said it would try to minimise the effect of reduced local power generation with imports.
Online Reporter