19 Mar 2018

Chief executive officer of Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) Dr Stefan Schwarzfischer says progress made on the restructuring of their organisation dubbed Masa 2020 was ‘quite impressive.’ 

The five-year strategy is a transformation journey to realise BPC's vision of being “a leading power utility in the region” by the year 2020. 

The strategy seeks to turn the corporation into a profitable and efficient entity by 2020.

Speaking during a media briefing on the Masa 2020 Transformation Strategy update recently, Dr Schwarzfischer said the corporation was willing to stick to its past glory days and make it more efficient again.

He said BPC was driven by three strategic pillars namely, a new energy mix, bringing power to all the people and finally, making BPC proud again.

“BPC needs to work on the right energy mix, coal plus renewable energy. BPC will step into joint ventures for the establishment of new power plants. 

It will not cater for small power plants but will leave that for independent power producers. Government and BPC need to establish a subsidy framework for small power plants as they are no commercially viable,” he said.Dr Schwarzfischer explained that BPC had embarked on a comprehensive renewable power development strategy in which it would develop and operate a 100 MW solar power plant. He said the corporation would also develop and operate mini hybrid power plants in 20 isolated villages as a joint venture.

“In addition BPC will build 12 smaller solar Photovoltaic plants in dedicated villages total 75MW as IPPs. BPC will install power storage containers all over Botswana in order to store the power during the day and dispatch it at night. The BPC requires grants for this project,” he added. 

He noted that remedial works at Morupule B were ongoing and negotiations for contract for planning and shutting down of first unit for one year was ongoing between BPC and the Chinese contractors CNEEC. 

He told the meeting that three units at the power plant, namely unit 1,2 and 4 were currently on full load while unit 4 was on planned statutory outage and will be back in operation by next month. He promised that all the four units will be on full load throughout the winter season. Giving an update on the refurbishment of Morupule A, Dr Schwarzfischer said the project experienced delays due to implementation of modifications in order to achieve high performance of the plant and stability of power generation. However he said the plant would be fully operational by July this year. On rural electrification he said 80.6 per cent of the villages had been electrified or had access to the network. 

Dr Schwarzfischer said BPC had connected 94 villages to the grid while the remaining 92 would be connected within the next two years. “BPC wants to improve more electricity connections to Botswana and cover the whole country within the next five years. 

This is a joint effort of government and BPC. 

We need to reduce faults and outages as well as response times to our customers. We need to establish a programme to connect customers faster and less expensive and we also need to shift our future investments and capacities from generation to distribution,” he said. ENDS