Malawians face ‘dark’ festive season
Malawians should brace for continued power outages during the Christmas and New Year festive seasons as the Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) says load shedding will continue due to reduced generation capacity.
In an interview yesterday, Escom public relations manager Kitty Chingota added that the country should expect more blackouts due to storms in the rainy season.
She said: “So far, we have opened the Kapichira Power Station and everything is fine. However, load shedding will continue because we generate less power than demand. Again, this is rainy season and storms are inevitable. This will affect electricity [supply].”
Late last week, Escom announced the shutdown of Kapichira Power Station from December 13 2013 to December 15 2013. Many consumers expected improved power supply after the shutdown, but Chingota dismissed the assertion, saying: “The purpose of the shutdown [of the power station] was to enable the contractor to carry out commissioning tests of the Kapichira Phase 2 new machines and carry out other maintenance works. Everything went well, but generation capacity remains the same.”
Escom power generation capacity is 288 megawatts against the demand of over 350 megawatts, according to Chingota.
Escom has since applied for a tariff hike of 58 percent to the Malawi Energy Regulatory Authority (Mera) which is currently holding public hearings to get stakeholders’ views.
But many individuals and organisations, including the Institute for Policy Interaction (IPI) and the Consumers Association of Malawi (Cama), have asked Mera to reject Escom’s proposal.
Recently, Escom also came under fire from consumers when it donated K35 million (about $85 700) to the Presidential Initiative on Safe Motherhood as well as for purchasing vehicles worth K1.4 billion (about $3.5m), developments seen by consumers as extravagant.
In October this year, fire gutted Escom offices in Blantyre destroying an unspecified amount of property, including data.
An investigation was instituted to establish the cause of the fire but, up to now, the findings are not out despite Energy Minister Ibrahim Matola saying the report was supposed to be out last month.
Asked about the fire report on Wednesday, Chingota repeated that it was not ready.
