Zimbabwe’s cash-strapped power company has warned of massive power outages due to a breakdown at the main thermal power station, reports said on Tuesday.
All six generators at Hwange Power Station, which has a capacity to generate 590MW of power, have broken down, the state-controlled Herald newspaper reported.
In addition to this, the main line drawing power from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been damaged, and three small power stations inside Zimbabwe are not operating due to a shortage of coal.
A combined loss of 680MW of power would result in townships, suburbs and industrial sites being subjected to power cuts lasting up to 10 hours, the paper quoted Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority spokesperson James Maridadi as saying.
”We expect the problem to persist probably to the end of the week,” Maridadi said.
”Engineers and technicians are working round the clock to ensure that domestic generation is restored to its normal capacity.”
Zimbabwe has to import more than 30% of its power requirements from the DRC, and from three of its neighbours — South Africa, Mozambique and Zambia.
The cash-strapped Southern African country, mired in a six-year old economic crisis, does not have enough foreign currency to replace broken power-generating equipment.
It cannot afford to mine sufficient quantities of coal, despite sitting on massive reserves and acute fuel shortages have hampered the transport of coal to power stations.
Zimbabwe is grappling with its worst economic crisis, which critics blame on President Robert Mugabe’s government and is dramatised by the world’s highest inflation rate of over 1 200% and shortages of food, fuel and foreign currency.
Western donors have shunned Mugabe over policy differences, including the seizure of white-owned land to resettle blacks, which has forced the veteran leader to turn elsewhere for help.
Internet woes
In September it was reported the Zimbabwe’s international satellite link had been cut off after the national telephone company failed to pay a $710 000 debt.
The managing director of Tel-One, the country’s sole fixed-line phone company, told the Herald newspaper that the company had been disconnected from the key Intelsat link.
Wellington Makamure was quoted as saying Tel-One had applied to the country’s central bank for critically scarce hard currency to pay the fee.
”[The] Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has promised to look positively at our plea,” he said.
He added that Tel-One was rerouting Zimbabwe’s internet traffic through other means, resulting in a service slowdown. There are about 500 000 internet users in the country of 11,6-million people.
President Robert Mugabe’s government tightly controls internet use, and almost all internet traffic is forced to pass through Tel-One.
Zimonline, one of the country’s major internet service providers, said in a statement at the time that the cutting-off of the international satellite link was causing near-complete collapse of internet in Zimbabwe.
However, internet services in Zimbabwe were restored after Tel-One paid its outstanding $700 000 debt to Intelsat, a company spokesperson told the media.
Power for Africa
In 2005, it was reported that Eskom had unveiled plans to build the world’s biggest hydroelectricity plant on a stretch of the Congo River, harnessing enough power for the whole continent.
The proposed plant at the Inga Rapids, near the river’s mouth in the western Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), would cost $50-billion and could generate some 40 000MW, twice the power of China’s Three Gorges dam.
The river is seen as ideal. Known as the ”river that swallows all rivers”, it is fed by 10 000 streams that funnel into powerful rapids along its 4 640km course.
Rather than damming up the river entirely, the plan by Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned power company — which won over independent experts — involves creating a ”run-of-river” plant in which water is siphoned off, channelled through turbines and then fed back into the river.
Such plants are common in Canada, Norway and Switzerland, although their output is much less than that from a dam. — Sapa-dpa, Reuters, Guardian Unlimited Â