In this final part of the Electricity situation we take a look at the state of ZPC power stations, the contribution from private players as well as the fate of Zimbabwe’s power situation in the short term.
File footage of Hwange Power Station Courtsey of AP
Sources:
Chronicle
Zimbabwe Energy Regulation Authority
DPA Africa
Britannica
Google Books
Get Invest
Rift Valley Energy
Europe Auto News
3 comments
If we are so reliant on the British how come we have the Chinese doing Hwange Thermal Power Station expansion?🤔
You said it yourself. Expansion. So adding more units can be done by anyone so long they can integrate the new system with the old one. But running maintenance on the old one requires the guys who put it up in the first place.
I don’t think Hwange are reliant on Britain at all. For a start, a quick search on the wikipedia page shows that while Babcock Engineering as one of the makers, it also lists MAN (German), Altsrom (French) and Ansaldo Engeria (Italian). Remember construction was in the ’70s, during UDI and sanctions against the Smith government.
If memory serves the boilers were from Babcock, the turbines from Alstrom and the generator from Ansaldo but that was from a tour 20 years ago, so I may be wrong.
I also think you are also making a mistake assuming a massive, one-off engineering project works the same as a mass produced product. There is not a factory somewhere with racks of massive boilers of ‘type Hwange’. Instead, there are blueprints and manufacturing standards which ZPC will have a copy of, to build each part. If a boiler gets a crack, you weld a patch of steel over it, you don’t order a new panel.
There are a limited number of companies with the skills and equipment to manufacture the specilized parts, none of which are local, so Forex is the blocking factor. There isn’t any limitation for British parts or a limited timeframe for parts though.