Legislators� frustrations mount on electricity crisis
Isaac Pinielo | Friday May 29, 2015 15:06
Each year, the Ministry appears before the Public Accounts Committee and each year, faces difficulties explaining why the same issues keep cropping up without significant progress. The Ministry’s task this year was made more difficult as the accounting officer, permanent secretary, Kgomotso Abi, made his presentation at the height of the winter load shedding programme.
Thus far this winter, national power demand has peaked at 560MW with a deficit of 125MW. Annual peaks are expected to reach 620MW sometime next month and imports from the region can be ruled out due to shortfalls among neighbouring states.
Yesterday, Abi revealed that one boiler had broken down at Morupule B on Wednesday, with a boiler leak suspected. The incident means only Units 1 and 2 are operating with output of 290MW.
“Unit 3 is down and we expect it to be up sometime next month. Unit 4 was running up to yesterday morning when it had a breakdown. “When this happens, we have to let it cool down before seeing what the problem is.
“It’s an external leak of the boiler, we suspect, and this should be fixed within a week or two,” Abi said.
At present, therefore, the country is generating 290MW at Morupule B and has access to another 160MW from two diesel generating plants at Orapa and Matshelagabedi. The Matshelagabedi plant will be expanded from 70MW to 105MW by the end of July, further easing the deficit.
However, support from South Africa is increasingly limited. The non-firm agreement for 100MW is only available when South Africa is not load shedding, which has rarely happened in the last six months.
“On Wednesday, Eskom had to withdraw their power from us, as they were load shedding and we had to load shed too,” Abi said.
Even after giving updates on the expansion of Morupule B by another 300MW and the planned 300MW independent power project, as well as the pledge to have Morupule A running by the end of the year, Abi’s tune had clearly been heard before.
Leading the firing line, Samson Moyo Guma stated that Morupule B should be shut down since it has proven to be a failure.
“It looks like there’s no sense of urgency when dealing with the crises we are facing in the country, and ideas seem to have dried out completely,” he said. PAC member and Gaborone Bonnington South legislator, Ndaba Gaolathe, said it appeared the ministry was not in a hurry to set public targets for itself or to stick to them. “The whole country and investors should have an idea of your targets for capacity in power generation over 10, 20 or 30 years, for distribution and for unit costs.
“Everyone talks about the need for a regulator and you have talked about this for a long time. When are we going to have this?”