26 Nov 2018

Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) chief executive officer says the corporation is connecting 41 villages to the national grid and extending the grid in 72 others at an approximate cost of P305 million.

Briefing the media in Gaborone last week, Dr Stefan Schwarzfischer, said 83.6 per cent of villages had access to the network. 

Additionally, he said the country had not experienced any load shedding in the last four years, except for faults and outages due to planned maintenance.

“BPC recently connected 15 new villages to the grid and extended the grid in 45 villages at an approximate cost of P202 million,” he said, adding that the corporation’s operating profit, without subsidy for October 2018, stood at 2 per cent.

He noted that two units at Morupule B power station were operational, producing 260MW of electricity and the third unit would return to service mid-December.

Dr Schwarzfischer further indicated that the fourth unit was undergoing scheduled remediation for the next 12 months.

“The average national demand during the day is 400MW and until the third unit returns to service, the power deficit is covered by our emergency diesel power plants, the SAPP market or Eskom,” he said.

He said Morupule A station was undergoing safety checks, before being returned to commercial operation, an exercise that would be concluded in May next year.

Dr Schwarzfischer further said preparation of tender documents for the 100MW had been concluded and BPC needed to secure government’s approval before proceeding with the procurement process.

“The tender for the 12 Grid Tied Solar Power Plant on an Independent Power Producer (IPP) basis was published on November 23 and the documents are available for issuance. 

BPC will facilitate the procurement process on behalf of its parent ministry and BERA,” he revealed.

He said BPC wanted to provide more electricity connections to Botswana and cover the whole country within the next five years, adding that it also needed to reduce faults and outages as well as response time to its customers.

“BPC needs 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.

Touching on the faster connection initiative rolled out in 18 work centres across the country, Dr Schwarzfischer said turn-around-time reduction of more than 70 per cent from average of 37 days in June 2018 to less than 10 days in October 2018 had been realised.

“Up to 80 per cent of quotations in some work centres are provided within an hour,” he stated.

He said some of the challenges included customers not providing plot numbers when applying, BPC Geographic Information System (GIS) not fully updated with plot data and BPC electricity network.

Dr Schwarzfischer said they were continuing to improve provision of instant quotations and planned to roll out additional changes on physical connection process at the beginning of 2019, to reduce overall connection time.

“We are targeting overall connection improvements to achieve 15-day turn-around-time for simple service connection in 2019,” he said.

He noted that so far, BPC reduced the time to connect household customers (service connections) by 70 per cent in the last nine months, and also reduced the connection time to bulk customers (capital works) by 71 per cent in the same period.

Dr Schwarzfischer said BPC is set to drive business through process optimisation, integration of IT systems, high performance and customer orientated culture, financial turnaround, restructuring the balance sheet, effective working capital and debtor management. ENDS