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The Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) has embarked on aggressive customer engagement programmes countrywide.
The objective is to engage, update and conduct awareness programmes to address pertinent issues affecting stakeholders, especially in rural areas.
On Saturday, ZETDC was at Gokwe Centre and the Commercial Director Engineer Ralph Katsande spoke to the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC)’s Tafara Chikumira where he highlighted a number of issues.
“As ZESA, we have embarked on a nationwide outreach to our consumers and key stakeholders. The objective is to interact with our customers, get to know them better and educate them on existing issues. As you are aware, the power supply is the key enabler for vision 2030. Electricity is critical in attaining Vision 2030. We have gone out of the way in our Partnership with ZBC to reach all corners of the country.
“We are in the winter high demand season where the consumption of electricity peaks, mainly due to demands such as winter wheat, water heating, and space heating. Our demand has risen to about 1 850 megawatts. During summer it was averaging between 1600 and 1 650 megawatts. We now see this peak is due to the loading cost of winter wheat irrigation. We have a number of interventions to augment internal generation with our imports. We are looking at getting imports from Mozambique and Zambia to increase the power supply. At the end of this year, we will see the commissioning of the first power unit at Hwange. That should add 300 megawatts to the network and that should go a long way in reducing load-shedding,” Eng Katsande said
He called on stakeholders to pay up their bills. The payment will enable ZETDC to operate the system, provide services and pay for its imports. Enough revenue will also enable the power utility to fund its operations.