LINDA SOKO TEMBO writes
WE have been allocated 11.5 billion Cubic meters of water which will be able to generate 275 megawatts of power up to the next rain season ZESCO has said.
ZESCO senior manager corporate affairs John Kunda said that looking at the amount of water they were given it was very important for the institution to make very strategic decision not to generate power at full capacity.
In an interview, Dr Kunda said if they were to generate power at full capacity they risked shutting down the operations and that it was important for ZESCO to ration the production of power so that they could maintain the power resource that they were allocated.
Dr Kunda said it was for this reason that Load Shedding had not ended and that it had continued for about 8 to 10 hours a day instead of 12 hours.
“It’s true our customers are still experiencing Load shedding and it has not come to an end. It is a very strategic management tool of the limited resources that we have and the major impact is because of the drought that we experienced in the previous rain season,” he said.
“Load shedding is not good for business, and for ZESCO it’s a product that brings us revenue because if we are not selling electricity then we are not making money. People should know that load shedding in as much as it is painful to our customers to it is also painful to ZESCO. It will be a nothing of the past very soon,” he said.
Dr Kunda said that it was true the water levels had increased at the Kariba dam to about 40 percent as of last week but he made it very clear that ZESCO was not the custodian of the water at the Kariba dam and that the water was managed by Zambezi River Authority (ZRA).
He said every year ZESCO and Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) were allocated certain amount of water to manage so that they could generate power and this year they had both been allocated 11.5 billion cubic meters of water which they had to manage well.
