Kabo Ngwanaamotho

In the face of a looming electrical power shortage crisis i would like to know what my country s doing about it…

There has been a spate of power blackouts in our neighboring country, South Africa. Bear in mind that the South African power utility, Eskom, supplies at least 80% of Botswana power needs to BPC. Now Eskom has decided that it needs to carry out load shedding in order to curb their own crisis back at home, this means that over the next three to four years they are going to reduce their supply to Botswana. So next year Botswana is facing a shortfall of about 60MW – where is that going to be sourced from? Your guess is as good as mine! Word in the street is that Morupule has the capacity to produce more, i dont know how true that is – but apparently in 2010 Morupule will be able to supply enough to cover the shortfall? And then there is Mmamabule – OK, maybe the future is not so dull after all – but my concern is before all these are fully operational is Botswana going to be in the dark?

We could buy from Mozambique – at least thats what i heard from the press – but apparantly because we have to use the Zimbabwean grid for that it seems they do not have the capacity for such transmission – but the grid is interconnected – i think we used to get a fair share from Zims before the economic collapse. That said – our neighbours Namibia have invested about ZAR4 billion in the form of a loan to Zimbabwe to run a certain coal station in Zims – repayment of the loan is supply by Zims to Namibia over a perid of 5 years of 130MW (not sure about figure though)  – did someone say Zims does not have the infrastructure – well, mabye its politics!

There is this thing called the SAPP (Southern Africa Power Pool) – i thought the purpose of this pool was to ensure that all countries in the region enjoy an uninterrupted energy supply because even the entire grid amongst member countries is interconnected – i guess i was mistaken!

Question – what is Botswana’s stand so far?