The Zambezi River Authority says one of the power stations in Kariba has exhausted usable water for generating electricity and should suspend operations with immediate effect until January, 2023.
In a letter to the managing director of the Zimbabwe Power Company, Engineer Munyaradzi Munodawafa, chief executive of the Zambezi Water Authority, said the water levels have reached a critical level, which may lead to the shutdown of the Kariba Power Plant if no action is taken to control water usage in Lake Kariba.
The letter reads in part, “Please be advised that as of 25th November 2022, Kariba South Bank Power Station had utilised 23.89 Billion Cubic Meters (BCM) of water, accounting for 1.39 BCM (or 6.16%) above the 2022 water allocation of 22.50 BCM. Given that the Kariba Reservoir usable storage currently stands at a paltry 2.98 BCM or 4.60% full, and that ZESCO Limited still has a positive balance of 2.44BCM (10.82%) as of 25th November 2022, ZPC/KHPC (ZPC/Kariba Hydro Power Company Private Limited) no longer has any usable water to continue undertaking power generation operations at Kariba South Bank Power Station.”
Munyaradzi said with the current performance of the 2022/2023 rainfall season in the Kariba Lower Catchment “where the river flows are yet to improve and the associated inflows from the Upper Kariba Catchment which will only influence any potential increase in the Lake Level at Kariba during the later part of the first quarter of 2023, it is highly unlikely that there will be any reasonable inflow augmentation in the remaining period of the year 2022, giving little or no chance of improvement in the reservoir storage levels during the remaining period of the year 2022 and going into the first quarter of the year 2023.”
He said if the current water utilisation at Kariba South Bank Power Station continues, the remaining water for power generation at Kariba will run out by mid-December 2022 or much earlier.
“Guided by the Water Purchase Agreement and the provisions of the ZRA Acts, as well as the agreed Reservoir Operational Framework under the Joint Technical Committee (JTC), where the Authority and the two Kariba Power Generation Utilities are obligated and have agreed to sustainably operate the reservoir, the Zambezi River Authority is left with no choice but to firmly guide that ZPC/KHPC immediately ensures that generation activities at the South Bank Power Station are wholly suspended henceforth, until January 2023 when a further review of the substantive Hydrological Outlook at Kariba will be undertaken which will include consideration of the total reservoir live storage build-up which would have resulted from a shutdown of the Kariba South Bank Power Station power generation operations.”