In recent months, numerous residents in Bulawayo have voiced their frustration over persistent electrical faults and vandalism that remain unattended for extended periods.
These issues are causing significant disruptions to daily life, impacting households by leading to spoiled food, difficulties in cooking, and challenges in maintaining comfortable home temperatures during extreme weather.
Residents are particularly frustrated by the lack of urgency in addressing these faults. Reports suggest that when issues are reported, the response time from the electricity provider is often slow.
The Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) recently issued a statement apologizing to its valued customers nationwide for the delayed resolution of faults.
“This is due to an increase in the number of fault reports, resulting in some faults taking longer to be attended to,” they said.
ZETDC indicated they are working tirelessly to resolve this and clear the backlog, urging affected customers to bear with them during this period.
Some residents in western suburbs have shifted their electricity fault reporting strategies to reporting through their ward councillors, hoping for faster response times.
“We are still struggling with electricity, we are failing to contact ZESA employees,” said one resident.
Another resident indicated they had a fault due to an electric surge, and were told to buy three different breakers.
“We paid about US$322.71 for them to be purchased, but they haven’t fixed it,” said the resident.
In eastern suburbs, electricity faults are mainly due to rampant cable theft.
Responding to questions sent to him via email, the Minister of Energy and Power Development, Edgar Moyo, urged residents to utilise the ZETDC fault reporting system that allocates reference numbers.
“Faults are responded to following the referencing in the system. The first faults to be reported are the first to be resolved. Reported faults can easily be tracked on their progress using this system,” he said.
Moyo noted that one of the challenges causing delays in responding to power faults is the vandalism of electrical infrastructure. “Such kinds of faults would take longer to resolve because the utility may not have the required replacement materials readily available in stock.”
He said the winter season has seen an increase in the number of faults caused by overloading of the power circuits due to increased electricity usage.
This increased demand has also resulted in the available supply being inadequate to cater to the demand, hence some circuits go on load shedding. “When an area is under load shedding, it may take longer to diagnose some faults.”
Minister Moyo highlighted the challenges faced by the utility in resolving faults due to theft and vandalism of electrical equipment.
“There has been a huge number of vandalism cases that require the replacement of equipment like transformers, copper cables, and switchgear. These may not be readily available and may cause delays in the resolution of those faults.”
He indicated that on a weekly basis, his Ministry receives a report from the power utility on the network status, power outages, and the reasons for unresolved outages, “That way progress and fault resolution times are monitored.”
Moyo said if residents are not satisfied with power fault handling procedures by ZETDC, they can use the reporting platform through the Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (ZERA) platform, and the issues can be looked into to assist the residents.
“Generally, the demand and supply issues. The current supply is around 1550MW (including imports and IPPs supply) against a demand of 1850 MW. Hence the implementation of load shedding to a magnitude determined by the available power on any given day,” he said.
Meanwhile, Moyo said they are working on measures to deter vandalism of electricity infrastructure, adding that the utility continues carrying out annual maintenance to minimise network faults.
“To address load shedding, we are working on narrowing the supply-demand gap through several mitigation measures that include: mobilising foreign currency to enable us to increase electricity imports, increasing power supply sources through support and procurement from Independent Power Producers (IPPs), involving third parties in the reformed electricity supply industry, like Intensive Energy User Group (IEUG), Utility Warehousing, Africa GreenCo, Negomo, etc. (These players procure power locally and regionally and supply direct customers) and energy efficiencies improvement initiatives like power factor corrections and demand side management, refurbishment of Hwange units 1 to 6, and the integration of battery energy storage systems,” he said.
