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Egenco restores 64.8MW at Kapichira

Electricity Generation Company (Egenco) has completed repair works at Kapichira Hydro Power Station in Chikwawa District, restoring 64.8 megawatts (MW) lost in the national grid in December last year.

Electricity Generation Company (Egenco) has completed repair works at Kapichira Hydro Power Station in Chikwawa District, restoring 64.8 megawatts (MW) lost in the national grid in December last year.

In a statement yesterday, Egenco said Kapichira Unit 1 was back in operation as of Tuesday, January 21 after undergoing repairs due to abnormal noise.

Engineers work on one of the faulty units. | Courtesy of Moses Gwaza

“This means that Kapichira Power Station is now back to 100 percent generating capacity,” said the statement.

Kapichira has four machines with a total generation capacity of 129.6MW, each producing 32.4 MW.

Following the outage in December, Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) extended power rationing from two hours per day to at least three hours from 6pm to 9pm per day.

In an earlier interview, Egenco spokesperson Moses Gwaza assured that the power utility would meet the rehabilitation deadline of January end.

Escom acting chief public relations officer Peter Kanjere said yesterday the full restoration of Kapichira Power Station will enable the electricity supplier to revise load shedding hours downwards.

He further said that Egenco communicated to Escom yesterday that its machines are operating at a capacity to produce 351MW while Escom is also receiving about 50MW from independent power producers.

According to Kanjere, this gives Escom 401MW of available capacity during the day while during the night, the generation capacity remains at 351MW because solar power is not available.

He said: “At present, the electricity demand stands at 378MW, leaving an unmet demand of 27MW. As a result, we are still required to shed that amount of load to balance the system.”

Egenco has a total installed generation capacity of 441.95MW, with 390.55MW from hydropower plants and 51.4MW from standby diesel power plants.

Malawi Government planned to generate 1 000MW of power by 2025 following reforms which it said had opened up opportunities for independent power producers.

However, the target was missed due to poor or delayed response from potential investors in the power sector.

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