Our power men are trying hard

The number of people left desolate after the visitation of the Moderate Tropical Storm Ana has now reached over one million, and we are still counting. True to the predictions by the weathermen, Ana paid Malawi a visit, and in its wake devastation of gigantic proportions became the order of the day.

I am doing this article in the darkness because among the facilities that the storm damaged or would have damaged were hydro power stations. The biggest of these, Kapichira, has been shut down, depriving the nation of 130MW of power.

In an article that has enjoyed wide circulation on social media, one foreign based author bemoaned the fact that Malawians did not seem to be appalled by what he called “mediocrity” but celebrated it instead. One of the examples he gave was what was termed “Escom’s inability to deal with the annual water problem”.

The author was apparently not aware that generation of power is no longer undertaken by Escom, but Egenco, but such misrepresentation of facts is probably not a serious issue. I remember that many people still called the now defunct statutory bus service UTM although it had changed to Shire Bus Lines. Some people still think that Post Office is responsible for installing and maintaining land lines.

What I do not agree with is the assertion that there has been no improvement in the handling of power by, as the said author puts it, and that the same problems of water induced damage to power stations keep recurring year in, year out.

If truth be told, there has been great improvement in the delivery of power in Malawi over the past one-and-a-half years. We bought a genset three years ago meant to be used during the frequent blackouts we were experiencing then. Over the past one year, and before the storm, I only remember using the genset once. This was when we had a fault on the overhead line serving us. I was actually getting worried that the genset would go rusty. Sometimes we would just wheel it out of the house and turn it on, letting it run for some minutes to avoid some parts deteriorating from being idle.

For sure, Escom is not perfect yet. But it is not where it was two years ago. Neither is the new comer, Egenco.  A number of strides have been made in terms of increasing Egenco’s generation capacity, the target being 1 000MW by 2025. The construction of the 350MW Mpatamanga Power Station, for example, is due to start this year.

What is more, Malawi’s power sector is planning to diversify power sources so that we are not over-reliant on hydro generation, which is prone to environmental problems. With the fast degrading environment, hydro generation problems will increase, rather than decrease, in frequency and intensity.

Some of the power sources being pursued are solar generation and interconnection between Malawi and the neighbouring countries. The probability that Malawian power stations and Mozambican ones will be flood damaged at the same may not be zero but it is very low. We can still have power from Mozambique in the event of another destructive storm damaging our power stations. And Mozambicans can have power from Malawi in the event of their stations getting damaged.

If you call that mediocrity, you are surely guilty of terminological inexactitude.

Would the damage occasioned by Tropical Storm Ana have been averted? I am not competent enough to give a well informed answer to this question. The majority of Malawi’s population is not either. Nothwistanding, many commentators will air out their views on the matter, such views beng driven more by frustration than by any knowledge of the situation on the ground.

Engineers from a certain organisation visisted Kapichira last week and came back shaking their heads. The devastation has been thorough. Malawi has not seen anything like it before.

Could Egenco have adequately prepared for the storm or can they adequately prepare for future storms of a similar or greater magnitude? I think they should up their game and aim for just that. We all need to know that environmentally induced problems such as Tropical Storm Ana, will strike again, and again, and again!

As Egenco do their part to safeguard their assets, we should do ours to ensure that the environment does not degrade further. If we just watch as the environment deterioates, we will be accomplices to the problems our power generating entity will be facing. Future cyclones will for sure be more, not less, intense