Malawi in electricty crisis due to excessive debris at power stations

Malawi experienced a 24-hour power black-out from Thursday, electricity came back for less than three hours on Saturday before going off again due to heavy rains and flooding.

This has crippled both the social and economic activities of ordinary Malawians.

Electricity Generation Company (Egenco) was forced to shut its Nkula and Kapichira Power Stations making Egenco lose 270 megawatts (MW) of hydro generation capacity against the available capacity of 320MW.

Egenco senior public relations officer Moses Gwaza said in a statement, the closure of its major hydro power stations was a preventive measure against damage to the equipment due to flooding and excessive debris at the power stations.

“This has resulted in a loss of about 165MW of hydro generation capacity out of the recently available 326.45MW. The available hydropower generation capacity has reduced to 161MW, which include 4.5MW from Wovwe power station. This is against the national demand of 276MW as of this morning,”  he said.

“Currently, works to clear the debris are underway at the respective power stations so that once the water level situation has improved generation should resume,” Gwaza added..

The statement said  to mitigate and balance between current electricity demand and the available power supply, Escom has managed to supply only 176MW to its customers using power from available hydro generation from Egenco and diesel generation.

On his part, Electricity Supply Commission of Malawi (Escom) public relations manager Innocent Chitosi said during the period they prioritised supply of power to essential services like hospitals.

Escom has subsequently implemented emergency load shedding exercise in several areas across the country.

The statement said works to clear the trash are underway at the respective stations and generation will resume as soon as clearing of the clogged screens is completed.