Yesterday, BPC officials said the fragile state of electricity supply in the country pointed to further load shedding exercises in the coming days. On Tuesday evening, most areas in the country experienced a power outage which lasted approximately two and a half hours or less. BPC spokesperson, Spencer Moreri told Mmegi Business the outage was due to a drop in domestic power generation. He was yet to be informed of the reasons behind the fall in generation. Internally, Botswana has the capacity for gross electricity of 150mw from one unit of the new Morupule B and access to a total of 160mw from two power peaking plants in Orapa and Matshelagabedi.
The 120mw Morupule A power station remains mothballed due to aging and dysfunctional parts. This means that from internal sources, Botswana currently produces 310mw against national peak demand recently estimated at 570mw. The deficit is met from supplies from regional imports."We had an acute shortage of internal generation which meant we had to resort to load-shedding," Moreri said yesterday. "As we had advised last week, load-shedding will be introduced once the system is constrained whether because of faults or insufficient generation. Yesterday (Tuesday's) outage affected most parts of the country but it did not last too long. We expect the situation to persist for the next few days barring the unforeseen and we urge our customers to conserve power," he explained.
