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Mozambique: Cahora Bassa Power Interrupted, Causing Crisis for Eskom
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
28 October 2007
Posted to the web 29 October 2007
Maputo
Southern Africa's energy shortage was dramatically illustrated on Friday when power supplies were interrupted to aluminium smelters (including the MOZAL smelter on the outskirts of Maputo) and other key industries, because storms knocked out power supplies from the Cahora Bassa dam on the Zambezi.
Cahora Bassa can generate a maximum of 2,075 megawatts, and normally it supplies 1,500 megawatts to the South African electricity company, Eskom, which is far and away the dam's largest customer.
The supply from Cahora Bassa is 3.7 per cent of Eskom's total capacity, and Eskom cannot afford to lose it - particularly since, according to Eskom spokesman Tony Stott, a further 12 per cent of Eskom capacity (4,800 megawatts) was out of commission, due to maintenance work. Adding to Eskom's woes were unplanned shutdowns for what he described as "normal wear and tear repairs", a euphemism for breakdowns. That took out another seven per cent. So on Friday Eskom was short of over 22 per cent of its normal capacity. According to Stott, the Eskom repair schedule was not irresponsible. Without any maintenance work at all, it would have had a comfortable 20 per cent reserve - capacity would have been 20 per cent greater than demand. But the planned repairs brought reserve capacity down to less than 10 per cent, and the unplanned cuts to around one per cent.
Then came the storms in central Mozambique that cut off the supply from Cahora Bassa, which made it impossible for Eskom to go on supplying all its customers. Lightning and heavy rain caused technical problems, not at the Cahora Bassa power station itself, but at the nearby Songo sub-station, which feeds the electricity to the transmission lines heading south.
Eskom reduced power to some of its major customers - including the aluminium smelters in Richards Bay and Maputo. The power to MOZAL (900 megawatts) comes from a company called MOTRACO, which is a joint venture between Eskom and the Mozambican and Swazi electricity companies. But the bulk of the MOTRACO power is from Eskom.
Eskom asked other industrial users, such as Xstrata, which runs ferrochrome smelters in South Africa, to reduce their electricity consumption. There were also severe power cuts in major South African cities, including the Sandton business district of Johannesburg.
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Fortunately repairs at the Songo sub-station were rapidly concluded, and the normal flow of power from Cahora Bassa to South Africa resumed on Friday evening. But even when it receives the full 1,500 megawatts from Cahora Bassa, Eskom has been requesting key clients to reduce their electricity use, which is rather difficult in the case of aluminium smelters. BHP-Billiton, the largest shareholder in MOZAL and the Richards Bay smelters, told the South African Press Association (SAPA) said it had received power reduction requests from Eskom every day for the past three weeks.
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| Copyright © 2007 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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