Story by Providence Maraneli
POWER supply challenges are set to ease, owing to the operationalisation of more Independent Power Producers (IPPs), which are also feeding power into the national grid.
The development aligns with the national vision of attaining an upper-middle-income society by 2030.
A giant solar plant at Turk Mine in Matabeleland North province which has set the mining giant on a pathway to self-reliance, demonstrates commitment by independent power producers to end power challenges.
“We are now a generating plant and ZESA also wants power from us. In terms of our voltage, we are almost at the end of the supply side of either Kariba or Hwange, our voltage has improved. We are currently not exporting to ZESA but we have an agreement with ZERA that once we get excess power, we export to ZESA,” said Turk Mine Solar Plant’s engineer, Mr Wilson Mujuru.
Turk Mine solar plant joins a long queue of new independent power producers licensed by the Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (ZERA) to augment national power projects.
“The IPPs have come out handy, you know we have challenges with Kariba and sometimes with Hwange due to water and maintenance issues, so the coming up of these IPPs have helped us as a country. A workable example is that of Turk, which is a 4,5 Megawatts (MW) plant and this means we can take off this from the burden of our main sources of power,” ZERA’s Compliance and Monitoring Officer, Engineer Josiah Ncube said.
Government early this year licensed 10 independent power producers in order to increase private participation in electricity generation, with power sufficiency key towards the attainment of Vision 2030.
The licenced IPPs, Mutorashanga Indo Africa Solar, Gururve Solar Energy, De Green Rhino Solar, Equinox Solar, Murombedzi Solar, Great Zimbabwe Mini Hydro, Par Valley Energy, Acacia Energy, Energywise Vungu Solar and AF Power are going 271MW.
