Mozambique’s EDM to Resume Electricity Sales to Zambia
Mozambique’s publicly owned electricity company, EDM, announced on Tuesday October 17th that it will resume the sale of electricity to Zambia, through its Zambian counterpart, ZESCO Limited.
To this end, EDM chairperson Marcelino Alberto and the ZESCO General Director, Victor Mapani, signed a power supply agreement (PSA), under which EDM will sell 50 firm megawatts of power to ZESCO and a further 200 non-firm megawatts. (“Firm” means that the power is supplied at off-peak times.)
The two companies also extended an agreement whereby power is supplied from Zambia to Zumbo district, in the western Mozambican province of Tete.
The agreements were signed on Tuesday, in Luanda, on the sidelines of a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP).
According to Alberto, cited in an EDM press release, “Mozambique has an installed capacity of 2,790 megawatts, of which 1,057 megawatts are absorbed for domestic supplies at peak times, without including the supply for the Mozal aluminium smelter”.
Alberto said this meant that EDM “has a considerable surplus that we are putting on the export market through bilateral agreements and on the SAPP competitive market.
We want to cement our strategic position as a regional power generating pole, thus bringing the country more foreign exchange”.
Opening the meeting, the deputy governor of Luanda, Antonio Goncalves, said that SADC (Southern African Development Community) has an enormous potential in energy resources which needs to be exploited in an economically solid and sustainable manner, for the benefit of all.
“We feel signs of the growth of the SADC economies, which result from the industrialization drive”, said Goncalves. “But we need more energy to accompany the evolution that is occurring in our countries. Thus it is up to us to invest more in electricity supply infrastructures, to avoid future energy deficits”.
