Despite the country receiving normal to above normal rains in the current rainy season, load shedding seems to have continued affecting domestic households and consumers in almost all the parts of the country.
This has raised concern from the members of the public who have questioned the power utility company to state the cause of the continued load shedding when the country is now reporting floods in some parts of the country. Some areas are currently being load shedded for between 10 and 12 hours raising questions as to weather this load shedding is resulting from low water levels.
However, ZESCO Limited has explained that the power utility is within the communicated hours of load shedding, adding that if people experience load shedding beyond stipulated hours then it calls for concern because it could be that they are experiencing a shutdown or a technical fault.
In an exclusive interview with the Zambian Business Times – ZBT, on February 6, 2020, ZESCO Public Relations – PR Manager Hazel Zulu, said that the official hours of load shedding currently is between 10 and 12 hours countrywide.
She explained that this is because the country experienced below normal rainfalls in the 2018/19 season, causing the main power generating source, which is the Kariba dam to almost deplete because of the drastic reduction of the water levels.
“We need to appreciate that we have a power deficit and as such we are currently siting at about 810 Megawatts of power deficit, so if there is a deficit, it means that we can only generate so much power. You know that our water levels are still low especially at the Kariba dam so we cannot generate at optimal capacity because of the deficit”.
She further told ZBT that “As you know, despite the rains we are experiencing, it will take quite some time before Kariba can fill up to the reasonable capacity, Zulu said that there has been some improvements in power generation at the Kafue gorge power plant but that the country largely depends on the Kariba dam generation plant which has not returned to full generation capacity currently”.
“This means that all our customers must share the power that we have right now, equally across the country. Therefore, we cannot currently manage avoid some level of load shedding, we have to load shed so that we can give power to everyone. We have the schedules in the Newspapers, it is there on our Website and on our Facebook page”, Zulu said.
The ZESCO PR Manager further said that the engineers will do a technical review at the end of the rain season, access the situation and will advise whether to reduce the hours of load shedding or not, based on sound and technical findings.
Some sections of society have questioned ZESCO on why load shedding has persisted when the country has been awash with good rains. There has been general expectations that the good rains would immediately result into resumption of 24/7 power supply across all customer segments.
But updates from the Zambezi River Authority, a Zambia and Zimbabwe shares agency responsible for monitoring the share Zambezi River flows and usage of water at the Kariba dam has indicated that the water levels remain low, but expectations are that there may be an improvement as upstream Zambezi River flow rate has increased, which feeds into the Kariba dam.
