The newly appointed Engineering Institute of Zambia – EIZ President Eng. Eugene Haazele has stated that the current energy crisis the country experiencing should be looked at as an opportunity for Zambian engineers to look into solar and other energy alternatives.
Haazele has explained that the current power deficit resulting into long hours of load shedding should be used as an advantage by local Engineers to explore ways of looking into alternative energy sources such as solar energy, other than depending of hydro generation which comes with environment complications.
He told the Zambian Business Times – ZBT in an exclusive interview that citizens could as well adapt to using solar panels in their homes as an important step to the country’s diversification process.
Zambia has been plugged into darkness as massive and prolonged power cuts affect the entire country which has been said to be a result of the reluctance by governments, past and present to expand and diversify the energy generation capacity and aggressively embrace alternative and renewable energy sources.
Energy experts talked to by ZBT have indicated that solar, wind, nuclear and bio-fuel are other viable energy alternatives that the country could undertake if the crisis of power shortages is to be solved.
When asked on other experts view that solar energy is actually more expensive than hydro power which may be the reason behind the reluctance to diversify, Eng. Haazele explained that Solar is not expensive than hydro as it only requires the sun which could not attract so much investments compared to hydro which needs dams and other facilities to be built to store water.
“Engineers must take it up for themselves to explore ways in which the country can diversify to solar energy which is actually cheaper to undertake. The country relies too much on hydro power generation and nothing or little has been done to move away from the over reliance on hydro generation, that’s why we get stack when there is no water in lake Kariba”.
“Besides hydro has environmental challenges hence it’s only better to diversify to using solar which only requires the sun to operate,” he said.
Due to a reported power deficit of over 750 MW, the country’s power utility company ZESCO is now subjecting some citizens to 15 plus hours of load shedding a day and this has inconvenienced households as well as reduced production in the economy as electricity is a major factor of production.
With the current power importation agreement by the government of Zambia and Eskom of South Africa, it is only hopeful that the solution to this power problem will soon be arri
