The national power supplier, Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) has vowed to reduce the power import to four percent beyond 2018. Botswana currently imports power from neighbouring countries South Africa and Namibia.
BPC Chief Executive officer, Dr Stefan Schwarzfischer last week said that performance development is attributed to the performance of Morupule B Power Station which significantly improved.
Official figures shows that in 2016/17 Botswana’s power imports were sitting at 32 percent whilst own generation was at 68 percent. Fast forward to 2017/18 power imports figures are now pegged at 19 percent while own generation is at 81 percent.
BPC told journalists in the capital Gaborone last week that Currently Morupule B is operating under three units (1, 2, and 4), whilst Unit 3 is on planned annual statutory outage and will be back in operation by April 2018. All the four units are expected to be on full load operation by this winter season.
At the same time, The Telegraph actual remediation works at Morupule B power station which commenced in the first quarter of 2017 are expected to complete in mid-2020.
“The ongoing remediation of MBPS will reduce the power imports further and the overall maintenance on Unit4 will reduce the power import to 4 percent. We are well catered for this 2018 winter. In the future, power imports will only cover for the peak demand between 6:00 and 8:00am as it does not make commercial sense to invest in to these generation capacities,” said Dr Schwarzfischer.
Meanwhile, Morupule A which has been under refurbishment is planned to be fully operational by July 2018. The project experienced delays due to implementation of modifications in order to achieve high performance of the plant and stability of power generation.
The refurbishment of Morupule A 132MW Power Station commenced in October 2015 with the appointment of Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction (DHIC) as the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor for the project.
