via Bulawayo24 NEWS | Hwange Power Station ruined by ‘earth tremor’. 12 June 2014 by Staff Reporter
HARARE – Power generation unit Zimbabwe Power Company sent out 2 150,33GWh of power in the first four months of the year, 3,56% down production targets, due to reduced capacity at most power stations.
In an update, ZPC managing director Noah Gwariro said generation was affected by system disturbances, low availability of boiler plant at the small thermal stations, shortage of feed water at Harare Power Station, as well as load control at Kariba Power Station.
“Towards the end of February this year, we lost Hwange Power Station as a result of an earth fault resulting in the loss of station transformer two,” he said.
Gwariro said a maintenance team at Hwange had managed to bring back the station, but the company was still waiting for the new transformer to be delivered so that it could be reinstalled at the station.
He said generation was likely to improve as ZPC has established various strategies in order to improve plant efficiency at the stations. “Some of these strategies include ensuring that there is adequate coal supply, as well as establishing plant performance monitoring and control methods. We have also put in place quality maintenance programmes to ensure that trips and tube leaks are reduced,” he said.Power generation has been a major problem in Zimbabwe and economists have cited this as a major challenge in efforts to revive industry.
COMMENTS
Earth tremor my arse. Incompetence is the root-cause of this.
This technical report is poorly compiled to make any meaningful sense to readers.I presume he meant that a missing station earth/ground caused the transformer to be unbalanced,thus damaging it.
Secondly,he claims that Hwange is restored but they are still waiting for the transformer,so how is it working unless they repaired the blown transformer.I fully agree with you @Bloody agent.
No money honey for the transformer ministers cars are more important and hey 90 percent of the population just chop down a few more trees so why worry who care Zimbabwe if Zimbabwe is in darkest Africa- literally.
We installed an earth relay protection device as is naturally the case with tx transformers of that magnitude and a Bucholz relay. so shut up and march out or else you start saying the truth and only the truth eseng sepe hape – modimo onthuse@#! Do we still have an NCC outside Harare coal thermal.If anything we cant lose any transfomer but they trip on fault to protect themselves and personnel and other piece s of plant. just say you don’t know nutting ’bout no nothing you slow learner.Haw’ satsha bo..!
huh!!!!!!!!!!
I read an unconfirmed report, that the UK generates, 6 000MW of solar & wind energy per annum? Zim has 50 times more sunshine etc and they cannot harness it. Sheesh
Wind turbines and solar panels cost a lot of money.
There is a real place for small solar panels with batteries for providing light in the evening, but heavier tasks such as cooking or air conditioning need big panels.
If you have incompetant people even solar will fail. A transformer has protection against earth faults among other faults. So why did this earth fault cause the TX to be damaged
During the time when the late Kumbirai Kangai was Minister of Energy, he was associated with the slogan ‘ZESA – Moto Muzhinji’. Since then, with ‘political engineers’ in control, we are back to the Stone Age!