Electricity Generation Company (Egenco) says it has completed emergency works on all machines at Tedzani Hydro-power Station as per plan.

The company planned a four-hour outage of Tedzani Power Station yesterday from 8am to 12pm to facilitate removal of excessive trash that clogged coarse screens.

But in a statement last evening, Egenco said it concluded the emergency works ahead of schedule at 11:35am, allowing all the machines to be back online that earlier expected.

On Friday, Egenco indicated that the work will require complete shutdown of Tedzani Power Station taking off from the national grid 121.1 megawatts (MW) and partial lowering of the head-pond level to create a safe working environment for the team carrying out trash removal works.

Egenco said trash removal is necessary to prevent excessive clogging of fine screens thereby avoiding frequent shut down of Tedzani machines due to reduction in penstock pressures.

Egenco generates a combined 94MW at Tedzani I, II and III while Nkula A and B feed about 135.1MW into the national grid.

Besides the five plants, Egenco also generates 4.35MW at Wowve Mini Hydro in Karonga, making a total of 233.5MW available against a demand of about 618MW.

But since January last year when Tropical Storm Ana damaged Egenco’s Kapichira Hydro Power Station in Chikwawa, knocking off 130MW from the national grid, Malawians have endured long hours of load shedding.

Malawi Confederation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry president Lekani Katandula is on record as having said businesses are spending about K260 million per day to run generators, translating to K7.8 billion monthly due to power rationing.

The post Egenco completes Tedzani emergency works first appeared on The Nation Online.

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