Staff Reporter

The Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission Distribution Company (ZETDC) issued a statement explaining the power outages that have hit the country recently.  

In a statement, apologising for the recent power outages, ZETDC informed that they were running the final evaluation phase on the Hwange Unit 7 station leading to long periods of load shedding.

“The Hwange Unit 7 is still undergoing commissioning and our engineers have taken it off the grid for evaluation of all systems in preparation of the final phase of commissioning since performance guarantees test,” read the statement.

ZETDC further explained that the 300MW from the Hwange Unit 7 had been temporarily removed from the grid resulting in its clients suffering general power outages throughout the country in the past few days.

Furthermore, ZESA Holdings has assured the nation saying that power will be restored as soon as the evaluation phase is complete.

“The load-shedding is only temporary, power supplies are going to be restored back to normalcy in a few days and that the ZETDC engineers are working flat out towards that,” read the statement. 

Power generation in the country has been on a steady increase with output reaching 1017 megawatts due to the upgraded Hwange Thermal Power Station which has been contributing to the bulk of it.

Hwange Power Station’s Unit 7 which was successfully synchronised last month had not developed problems, and had been outputting at most 708 megawatts which significantly reduced the nation’s power outages for the past three weeks.