The Malawi-Mozambique Power Interconnection Project deadline has been extended yet again to October 2025.
Disclosing this in an interview, project coordinator and Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) chief operations officer Maxwell Mulimakwenda said the June 2025 target is unlikely because the Mozambique works would require extra three months.
He said: “This is because the project had faced delays due to post election conflicts that forced works to stop, so considering that it is one project, the commissioning will wait until the Mozambique side is completed.”
On the Malawi side, Mulimakwenda earlier said works progressed well and they were almost ready for commissioning as early as March this year having completed much of the works in 2024.
Malawi reversed its earlier plan of tapping 120 megawatts (MW) from the project, saying it would have cost about $10 million (K17.4 billion) a month. Instead, he said Malawi will in the first five years get 50MW at about $4.5 million (about K7.8 billion) per month.
In a separate interview, former minister of energy Grain Malunga described the project as key to the country’s production sector which needs stable energy to thrive.
He said: “I believe this is achievable only if priority is given to the energy and production sectors. That is to say give the energy sector the needed resources to generate electricity and support manufacturing, mining and agriculture sectors, which will generate foreign exchange.”
The project comprises erection of 218-kilometre (km) 400 kilovolts high voltage power transmission line to feed about 50MW into the Malawi national grid.
The power interconnector is one of the projects expected to improve the local power shortage with Malawi likely unable to meet its target of hitting 1000MW power supply by 2025.
Currently, Malawi has a total installed capacity of 554.24MW of power of which 101MW is from solar sources, according to Escom.
In November 2021, President Lazarus Chakwera and his Mozambique counterpart Filipe Nyusi presided over the launch of construction works for the power interconnector transmission line.
However, construction works only started in March 2023, with the Indian contractor Larsen and Toubro Limited, assuring that they would finish by December 2023.
The power interconnector will also upgrade the country’s profile from an observer to a fully operational member of the Southern African Power Pool.
