Lower power import causes outages

Gothataone Moeng | Monday March 3, 2014 14:33

 

This comes after last week’s fresh wave of power outages which the minister said was a result of reduced imports from South Africa.

Mokaila was on Friday giving an update to Parliament on the Morupule B Power Station. The country is dealing with the nationwide power outages, which, in some areas, lasted over 12 hours.

Recently, the Zimbabwe Hwange power plant was shut down, which allows Namibia to get power from Zambia.  Mokaila said this resulted in South Africa having to divide her emergency power between these countries, and that was the root cause of the recent spate of power outages.

Only one unit at Morupule B is currently operational, running at reduced capacity and producing only 90MW.  Mokaila said they are currently modifying two of the units and hope that by end of April all four units at the power plant will be operational. While Morupule B has been plagued with technical problems throughout its development and operation, the situation worsened three weeks ago when all four units went offline simultaneously, resulting in total plant shutdown.

The shutdown forced the BPC to rely heavily on the costly 160MW output from two emergency diesel plants at Orapa and Matshelagabedi, as well as supplies from Eskom in South Africa and the region.

The BPC has been allocated P2.05 billion in the 2014/15 budget, which includes P1.5 billion for operational and maintenance costs and another P140 million for emergency power supply.