Loadshedding: Interval or end of all?

Mbongeni Mguni | Friday September 18, 2015 16:33

And they can hardly be blamed. In the seven years since loadshedding first breached local shores, set up shop and began retailing despair to unsuspecting consumers, cynicism has grown over any purported ‘solution’.

A series of setbacks have diligently tracked every planned resolution to the power crisis over the years.

The list of ‘resolutions’ is long and includes the failed 40MW deal with Zimbabwe, the abandoned 3,500MW Westcor Project, the collapsed 1,200MW Mmamabula Energy Project and a gas energy contract on the eastern coalfields that has been more stop than start.

Meanwhile, through those years of disappointments, the numbers of Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) consumers nearly doubled, straining the narrowing generation and ensuring that loadshedding – once a winter nuisance – became an all-year companion.

Between 2008 and 2014, the number of BPC consumers rose 74 percent to 343,050 while total unit sales growth averaged 3.1 percent over the same period, pointing to grossly unequal demand versus supply.

This winter, the brains trust at the BPC finally triggered a load management programme, initially piloted in Block 7 in November 2009 through the installation of smart metres.

The smart metres give the BPC the ability to remotely limit power supply to targeted households and starting in May, the utility limited urban households to 10 amps of power during peak periods, preventing wholesale blackouts and the inevitable household outage outrage.

“The load management programme has done quite a lot in terms of helping us meet demand,” says BPC CEO, Jacob Raleru, in an interview.

“If you look at the numbers, in terms of unserved energy, yes there were days where we were unable to meet demand, but the situation was better than it could have been.”

The onset of summer, with warmer temperatures and comparatively lower demand, has allowed the BPC to commence an ‘interim solution’ at the troubled 600MW Morupule B power station.

The solution involves work on the problematic heat exchange and boiler systems at each of the four units, which have been behind nearly all the breakdowns at the multi-billion-pula plant. Already, the solution has been implemented on Unit 2 and this will be spread to the other units, with the lower demand on the grid allowing for the repairs.

The full and proper remediation project for Morupule B will take two to three years, Raleru says. The warmer temperatures also allow work to be carried out on the 160MW emergency diesel plants at Orapa and Matshelagabedi, which were run as baseload or round the clock, to alleviate the winter power crunch.

Raleru is also hoping to secure part of the generation from the 120MW Morupule A ahead of winter 2016, should work on the mothballed plant’s rehabilitation kick-off soon.

Morupule A’s operations were suspended in August 2012 after an adverse cost-benefit analysis of the 26-year-old power station. The iconic power station had been constantly operating since 1989, with plant availability dropping from over 84 percent in 2008 to below 30 percent in 2012.

Studies suggest that once refurbished, the station could run for another 15 years at 80 percent plant availability.

Should all plans go accordingly, by winter the BPC expects at least 600MW from Morupule B, a healthy portion of Morupule A’s 120MW and sound support of 160MW from the diesel plants. An additional 35MW for one of these plants, Matshelagabedi, is due to be commissioned later this month.

Those figures should robustly meet and exceed winter 2016 demand which should hover around 600MW as forecast by the BPC.

So, is this RIP loadshedding 2008 – 2015?

“I would not say that we have seen the worst. It depends on how our interim solution performs. Also, this depends on how soon we can restore Morupule A.

“If the interim solution and Morupule A work, we believe the situation will be better,” Raleru says, picking his words carefully.

Even energy minister, Kitso Mokaila, stops just shy of paying his last respects to loadshedding. “By next winter, we should be in pretty good shape,” he tells journalists at a briefing.

“We are already seeing some level of stability and I will be more confident when the units at Morupule B have been running for at least one year.“ Raleru and Mokaila’s caution comes from the fact that judging next winter’s power situation by the comparative ease of summer has been many a power utility’s undoing.

Making confident pledges and commitments to consumers about winter, during the summer is equally perilous, a mistake Mokaila deftly steers away from.

“I am more upbeat about where we are and where we are going in terms of power,” Mokaila says. “I would say we are out of the woods if the units run for more than a year.”