Power Exports to Continue-Mapani
Zambia’s economy would crash if we stopped exporting power – Zesco
ZESCO Managing Director Victor Mapani says even if the country is anticipated to experience load shedding due to drought, the company cannot stop exporting power because doing so would collapse the country’s economy.
Meanwhile, Mapani says Zambia Sugar is among the many industrial entities that have been upgraded to the power purchase agreement, which provides a better deal than using retail tariffs.
Speaking during the signing ceremonies of the power purchase agreement between Zesco and Zambia Sugar, Tuesday, Mapani said power export contributes 40 percent to Zesco’s revenue and if it is stopped then the company will shutdown.
“How much power are we are exporting? We export under 28 percent of the power. And 28 percent of the power gives.”
Yes, we need the Forex! Continue exporting!
Just use whatever Forex you are getting and import more power!
Eight (08) hours of load shedding will cripple the little left of this sick economy!
At least aim to reduce the hours as a matter of urgency to 4 hours!
I am actually very annoyed with the complacency and arrogance of this ZESCO and your New Dawn government! You don’t take timely advice! You can’t even learn best practice from countries like Botswana on how to conserve electricity! Botswana relies heavily on imported electricity but the many years I stayed there, we never had this nonsense called loadshedding! Why?
In Botswana, they don’t use electric stoves or electric Geysers by Law!
They use Cooking gas and Solar Geysers!
The government came up with this deliberate policy to reduce domestic demand on the national grid!
The advice UPND was given from the beginning was to engage China and get millions of these gudgets and do an exchange with electric stoves and Geysers so that no household wiihave an excuse for using any electric stoves and Geysers so that excess power is directed to industries and small businesses to keep the economy growing!
We even advised UPND to ban charcoal to stop the rampant deforestation happening in Zambia. We asked them to make Cooking gas cheap but you find that our cooking gas remains the most expensive in the region!
The biggest Gas Cylinder (Net wt 48kg) in Zambia costs between K1,800 and K2,500 which is way too expensive for most households, making Charcoal more attractive where the largest bag of charcoal may sell anything between K250 and K400.
The largest bag of charcoal will only cover energy needs of the family for just a month while the largest Gas Cylinder can last the family up to 6 months! That is how convenient Cooking gas was because you only buy the big Cylinders twice in a year and you have clean, hassle-free cooking.
What government should do, as we had advised earlier, is to come up with incentives for Cooking gas producers so that the cost of cooking gas can be drastically reduced to compete with charcoal!
In fact, if you make Cooking gas cheaper than Charcoal, we will save our trees and most people will switch to cooking gas!
For those on farms and in the villages, we can help them with design and construction of Biogas digesters!
Our friends in Germany are able to generate electricity from Sewer systems!
I wonder why we are such dwarfs when it comes to innovative thinking on this continent! We don’t want to think outside the box. We wait to be hit by a crisis before we start thinking outside the box! That is lack of vision at several levels!
If we are not careful, our economy will inplode and many lives will be lost because of lack of visionary leadership!
We expected a lot of projects from Ministry of Green Economy but we have just delivered elementary issues!
We hope this good drought situation will serve as a wakeup call for us to stop destroying our forests!
You have raised very important observations especially in relation to the use of cooking gas and the fact that as a country we not being innovative enough in addressing the energy problems.
@ Chikubabe. We shall save the sewer systems for the annual cholera season. Its the only championship we have in the bag