Energy and Power Development Minister, Zhemu Soda, has said the commissioning of Unit 7 at the Hwange Thermal Power Plant is “almost complete”.

Speaking in an interview with State media on Wednesday, Soda said engineers are now finalising works on the protection system that allows evacuation of power from the Unit to the grid. He said:

The testing of the power plant was done and passed. We are only left with the testing of the protection system that allows for the evacuation of power to the transmission system and a team from China only came into the country in mid-December when we initially expected them in November.

There was also a delay in their understanding of all the systems; we are now expecting them to complete the test in three weeks and to have the plant run by end of this month.

Commercial production from Unit 7 was initially expected to start at the end of December 2022.

The Unit will produce 300MW and Unit 8, which is scheduled to be commissioned later in this quarter will also have the same capacity. Said Soda:

We don’t expect it to take much longer to commission Unit 8 because we have learned many lessons from the current unit.

After the commissioning of Hwange 7 & 8, ZESA intends to start major rehabilitation of the existing units to restore their capacity to 930 MW.

The government has reportedly secured US$310 million from the Export-Import Bank of India for the exercise. | The Herald