The government has blamed climate change for a decline in power generation at Lake Kariba as a power outage spoiled the first day of the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF).
In March, the Zambezi River Authority (ZRA) capped the average electricity generation of the Kariba Power Station at 214 megawatts (MW) against its installed capacity of 960 MW due to dwindling water levels.
Zimbabwe and Zambia share water equally for power generation at their separate power plants at Lake Kariba.
As of yesterday, the country was generating 1,074 MW split into 300 MW from Kariba and 774 MW from Hwange.
Power stations in Bulawayo, Munyati and Harare are currently idle.
In Bulawayo, exhibitors experienced a power outage during the first day of ZITF, with some having to resort to generators.
Gloria Magombo, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Energy and Energy Development, said the El Niño-induced drought had negative impacts on the country’s electricity generation capacity.
“We have lost about 600 megawatts in Kariba due to climate change,” Magombo said during the Township Economics and Rural Entrepreneurship Forum organized by DEAT Capital at ZITF on Tuesday.
“Climate change is real. It is affecting us and has brought us back to a very constrained supply point, and for that reason, we need to work together not only as a government, but also with the private sector in terms of addressing electricity supply.
She urged citizens to adopt renewable energy sources such as solar energy.
“Given the challenges we face, it is better to be independent, and once we have a good system, you can then sell the excess energy to ZISA (Holdings),” Magombo said.
“We want everyone to become an Independent Power Producer (IPP) using their roofs.
“As a government, we continue to look at how we can empower communities especially using renewable technologies. As a means of climate prevention some of the programs we have in our rural communities, we want to work with universities to ensure the uptake and cost of solar food dryers is reduced.”
Zimbabwe’s energy regulator, the Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority, has over the past five years licensed more than 100 small IPP projects with a production capacity of about 1,300 megawatts, but most of them remain non-operational.
One such project is the US$183 million Gwanda Solar Project which was awarded to controversial businessman Wicknell Chivayo. Newsday
