Escom rolls out faults clearing exercise
Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) on Saturday embarked on fault-clearing exercise in some townships in Blantyre City to speed up the restoration of power.
Speaking after visiting Chilomoni and Chirimba township, Escom public relations manager Kitty Chingota attributed the sole power supplier’s failure to clear electricity faults in time to poor road network, distance and continued rains.
She said: “As Escom, we are experiencing several challenges such as poor road network, distance but also rainfall which are affecting us to respond late to our customers when they report a fault.
“Every rainy season, we always face a challenge in fault-clearing. This is because water and electricity do not go together, so when it is raining, we do not clear faults.”
One of the Blantyre residents, Francis Kanduna, commended Escom for the initiative, but urged the power supplier to respond timely when a customer reports a fault.
“The problem is that Escom responds late when we report a fault, but also when they clear the fault, it does not take long before another fault occurs,” he said.
Over the past weeks, a number of households have been in the dark after heavy rains destroyed power infrastructure such power lines and poles.
This is on top of eight hours load-shedding consumers have been subjected to for the past year due to the damage of Kapichira Hydro Power Plant in Chikwawa in January 2022 due to Tropical Cyclone Ana.
The damage knocked off 130 megawatts (MW) from the national power grid.
In his State of the Nation Address at the opening of the 50th Session of Parliament in Lilongwe on Friday, President Lazarus Chawera said government is committed to providing reliable electricity to Malawians.
He said: “We have been working to rectify the situation and though the deadline to restore the Kapichira Hydro Power Plant by the end of the last quarter of 2022 was missed due to concerns for the environment, I am happy to announce that our engineers are on target to restore partial generation of power from the plant by the end of this quarter.”
Chakwera said the Mozambique-Malawi Interconnector Project, which will enable Malawi to import and export power to the Southern African Power Pool, is underway, with construction having started in November 2022.
In June 2022, Chakwera also commissioned the 20MW Golomoti Solar Power Station with Battery Energy Storage System. Last year, the Malawi Government secured a $25 million (about K26 billion) financing agreement to enable Golomoti Solar Power Plant to capitalise in solar power generation.
