ZESA Holdings has announced a comprehensive strategy to end load-shedding by next year and achieve universal access to electricity across the country by 2030.
The plan, outlined by ZESA executive chairman Dr Sydney Gata in an exclusive interview with The Herald in Harare yesterday, focuses on local manufacturing, international partnerships, and organisational efficiency.
It seeks to enhance energy security, and will lay a firm foundation for the country’s economic growth, improved quality of life, social equity, enhanced infrastructure, increased productivity and overall development.
In accordance with Government policy, Dr Gata said ZESA will rebundle its group of companies to streamline operations and enhance efficiency to create a more cohesive approach to energy management and distribution, allowing for quicker responses to national energy demands.
“I am very proud to announce that as a result of the measures we have taken, we now have positive investments in the generation sector as well as in other sectors of our industry,” said Dr Gata.
“What we did was to decide that it was not necessary for our Government and this is true for the continent of Africa, for them to guarantee investments which benefit, in the main, the multilateral corporations which invest particularly in the mining sector”.
Dr Gata said the mining and smelting sectors drew huge amounts of electricity and it was not necessary for the Government to borrow money to build power stations to support consumers that can build their own power stations.
“We have shifted the risk of energy supply in respect of the big companies from the Government and ZESA to the companies themselves. Bear in mind that our Government took a similar measure in another sector of energy which is the fuel sector,” he said.
“When they decided that we are no longer going to be importing fuel for you, you can import your fuel, you noticed how queues evaporated overnight.
“In our case, the queues manifest in the backlog of maintenance, the backlog of new connections, the backlog of our operations.
“So, to cure that, we decided that those customers we now describe as competent customers must fend for themselves, but we are assisting them”.
Dr Gata unveiled a timeline for power sector transformation, which includes significant milestones that promise to reshape Zimbabwe’s electricity landscape over the next decade.
This year, ZESA started with clearance of a connections backlog, and next year will mark the end of
load shedding.
“In 2026, the strategic plan is to clear the connections backlog. In 2027 the agenda is to end power imports, and target to be a net exporter of power by 2028. The target for 2029 is to be a world-class power lighting country and ultimately achieve universal access to electricity by 2030.
“There have been considerable investments. We now have captive power plant projects, they are six, which together add up to more than 1000MW that are being commenced, most of them in the next month,” said Dr Gata.
He said in total, there were nine new power station projects that are starting this month.
“We are doing the groundbreaking for three of them next month. They together will give us 2 690MW and our current dependable capacity hovers around 1500MW but quite often it can go as low as 1000MW.
“Next year up to December 2025, we shall have commissioned at least six of these projects aggregating to an additional new capacity of 2 690MW which is almost double our current dependable capacity,” said Dr Gata.
He lauded President Mnangagwa’s strategic leadership for helping or pushing them to action to come up with strategies that end the power challenges in the country.
“Another measure that we have taken to mitigate currency risk involves internalising the production of all the hardware that we deploy in the electricity supply industry.
“We have already commissioned an SPV that will manufacture cables and conductors. We need to replace some 24,000 kilometres of underground cable conductors in this country because they are old and rotten.
“So, we engaged a UAE company with access to both capital and technology to manufacture conductors and cables in this country as ZESA Enterprises,” said Dr Gata.
He said addressing the power situation in the country was not a short-term policy but rather a cocktail of measures that benefit future generations as well.
Dr Gata said power shortages were primarily caused by the illegal sanctions imposed on the country which prevented entities such as ZESA from accessing concessionary loans to fund infrastructure development.
“We have been unfortunate with Kariba hydrology or Zambezi hydrology to be more accurate. We have lost the capacity of Kariba… drastic losses. For instance the power station is rated at 1050MW today but we are hardly producing 150MW.
“What hurts the most is that Kariba is normally our baseload plant because it is cheap to deploy and also highly reliable. Hydropower plants have less equipment on them and are more stable to operate than confined power plants throughout the world.
“So, we lost our cheapest source of energy and our most reliable source of energy and that explains today’s load shedding,” said Dr Gata.
He said Hwange thermal power plant, which is more than 45-years-old, is behaving naturally as an old asset that cannot provide dependable capacity.
Source: Herald
