The impact of load shedding in 2024 is greater than in previous episodes because the demand for power is higher, ZESCO Managing Director Victor Mapani has stated
Responding to a question from a member of the public as to why this load shedding was worse than in 2019 despite increased generation, Mapani explained that in a cascade system when one power station loses a unit of power, the other power plants also lose an equivalent amount.
The 750MW Kafue Gorge Lower, which was added to the grid between 2021 and 2023, is built in a cascade system with the 990MW Kafue Gorge Upper. The 120MW Itezhi-Tezhi is the third power plant on the same Kafue River.
“The impact is more when you have a cascaded system because you are using the same water and Kafue Gorge Lower only generates half of what the upper station does so if the [Kafue Gorge] Upper is generating 500MW the [Kafue Gorge] Lower will be generating about 250MW. If it drops to 100MW, automatically Lower will go to 50MW so the loss is actually much faster.”
He added, “But more interestingly our load has also grown. The population has grown, demand has grown. In 2019, the population was much less than it is today maybe by about a million or two. That’s a huge change so the growth is massive and all those factors sit in there.”
Mapani also defended the competence of his team of technical staff, pointing out the reasons why schedules could not be adhered to most times.
He said ZESCO has good engineers to manage the crisis. He stated that the challenge was not competence but the reliance on unscheduled power, which ZESCO draws [from regional sources] simply because the grid is interconnected and not because it [ZESCO] has the power. He said unscheduled power was more expensive but ZESCO was in the process of firming it up.
He also attributed certain service failures to vandalism of ZESCO’s electrical installations and not competence. He said there are numerous instances where cables and transformers are stolen while an area is under load management such that when power is restored, the area would have no supply and residents will think they were still being load shed when in fact not.
