IPPs now moving into serious spending

INDEPENDENT power producers (IPPs) are now starting to feature on the daily generation returns, supplying a little under four percent of the power that the Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company moves around the national grid and sells to Zimbabwean consumers.

The latest figures show that the independents are now producing and selling 60MW or so each day, not a huge quantity, but they are still moving up from zero, so every bit extra shows the growth of a new economic sector.

Much of this power comes from solar, so it is there during the day, but not at night, but this is at this stage not a problem. For a start much of the industrial demand, and a good slice of the mining demand, is during the day.

In any case, with Kariba South now being significantly larger than the diminished flows of the Zambezi River into Lake Kariba can supply, Zesa in effect is operating a very large potential storage system.

As the solar builds up it can cut back on day-time generation at Kariba South, simply storing a good chunk of its daily water ration from the lake, and then use a lot more of its eight generating units at night than would be the case if it was running a 24/7 average use.

The studies show that the commissioning of Units 7 and 8 at Hwange, and they are now both on line having been pulled off for the final checks, was the major source of new power for Zimbabwe, the new 600MW taking up the slack that the major cut-back at Kariba South caused by the lower water rations from the Zambezi River Authority.

Zesa has now started the refurbishment of the older six units at Hwange, a job that will almost certainly see some modules in each unit having to be replaced and what amounts to a near total replacement of at least one of the units.

Besides its two large power stations at Hwange and Kariba South, Zesa also owns three small thermal stations in Harare, Bulawayo and Munyati.

But these received their latest equipment in the 1950s, spares are now impossible to find, and re-equipping the stations with modern generating units is almost certainly not a cost effective solution.

For a start, the cost of Hwange coal at those three stations would be several times the pit-head price, so if Zesa can scrape up extra capital for coal stations it would make sense to spend this at a power station on a coal field, which in fact is what the authority is doing both in the Hwange Extension and in the rebuild of the older units.

While the possibility of independent power producers is now a little over 20-years-old, there was negligible progress for much of that time.

For ZETDC to accept independent supplies requires contracts, price formulas and the like, and these were, until the Second Republic, simply missing.

Since 2018 there has been a lot of progress on the practicalities, which is why we are now seeing independent producers feeding the grid, with a lot more to come.

One very useful new investment is coming from an Italian company, which is planning a 100MW solar station to be built in two 50MW phases.

The top management of that company took the opportunity to meet President Mnangagwa on his trip to the Italy-Africa Summit and were very positive.

One reason in updating the President on progress was to seek an acceleration in the allocation of the needed land, these days, with almost all rural land now State land, a Government measure. We cannot see why this could even start to be a delay.

For a start, while a solar power station needs reasonably flat land, it does not need that much when compared to farms, and the land does not have to be productive land for farming.

In fact a solar station might well be the best way of using some largely infertile block of land, so long as it was either reasonably flat or sloped in the right direction to catch the sun.

While decent farmland would also make a good site for a decent solar power station, we should try and keep the best land for farming and use the most-suitably sited awful land for the power stations.

As more independent solar power stations are planned, the Italian company not being unique, it might be an idea if the lands unit in the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development had a good look at its holdings and identified suitable blocks of land so that as an investor moved from talking about good intentions to spending money, the site could be assigned promptly.

While solar is the obvious major new source of green energy in Zimbabwe, we are also picking up some useful small stations on a handful of the major interior dams.

These have been built for irrigation and urban water supplies, but if there is a daily draw down on the impounded reservoirs then a small hydro station starts to make sense.

At the very least it can generate the power to pump the water to the farms and the nearest city.

The 5MW station at Lake Mutirikwi is now 75 percent complete and the investors expect it to be operating by the end of April. This is a very small station, and there are companies with back-up generators that are around the same size.

But as we have noted, each addition to the generating capacity of the country, no matter how small, is an addition and we need all the power we can generate.

When those wanting to be independent power producers were invited by Zera, the energy regulator and the issuer of the required licences, there was a fair amount of interest.

But Zera and Zesa noted that those granted licences were not making any investments, and there was questioning of why this was so, with suspicion that perhaps some applications were just for speculation.

But now a group of investors have moved from either vague expressions of interest, or more dubious proposals, and we are starting to get the serious minded building their power stations, even if these are small.

Hopefully, we will now see these expanding their stations, and others who were licenced coming on board with the money and the hard work.