Tanesco Director General explains frequent power cuts

Dar es Salaam. The recent outcry over power cuts has ignited public debate over the root cause of the problem- with the government wading in to reassure customers.

Tanzania Electric Supply Company (Tanesco) director general Maharage Chande said yesterday that there currently was no power rationing in the country. But, there have been some minor power outages caused by transformer maintenance.

Energy Minister January Makamba about a week ago was at pains to explain to concerned citizens on social media who had said they wanted a lasting solution to seemingly endless power cuts.

One observer suggested that the minister should sack some of the managers at Tanesco, insinuating that power cuts were due to laxity at the power utility.

But Mr Makamba attributed the power cuts to ongoing scheduled maintenance, saying sacking managers is not a long-term solution to the power problem.

“People were once threatened with being fired for cutting off electricity in order to carry out scheduled repairs. They left scheduled repairs for fear of being fired. And we enjoyed staying without the power outage. As a result, the supply system is exhausted,’’ he wrote on Twitter last week.

He, however, added that there has been a neglect of the maintenance in the supply system for a while. Last year alone, Sh20 billion allocated for repairs was not used, Mr Makamba said - adding that it would take longer to restore the system to normalcy.

Speaking on TBC1 during a live interview yesterday, Mr Chande stressed that they were in the process of doing major maintenance on transformers which had contracted or some with destroyed tapes, leading to power outages.

His remarks come on the heels of a major outcry in the business community and other consumers who, according to them, have been facing power outages that last all throughout the day with no information from Tanesco.

Explaining this, he said the utility firm had short-, medium- and long-erm plans to improving Tanesco productsand services.

Mr Chande said the major challenge they were currently faced with was delay in connecting a majority of people to electricity services because the demand had increased with only this year they had a target of connecting at least 300,000 people to the national grid but in the first quarter they have connected 150,000 people 50 percent of their target.

“Recently there have been scores of people requesting to be connected to electricity, this follows a decrease in transformer prices,” he said.

Noting that a campaign that is expected to be launched November 20, this year, has seen the company starting to recruit contractors from outside (extra sub-contractors) to reduce the backlogs which until last month about 60 were pending.

“The company utilizes at least 40 percent hydro and 60 percent of electricity production is from gas, noting that in Kigoma and Katavi there is a huge challenge of electricity because they are not connected to the national grid and instead use diesel generators.”

Mr Chande further noted that as promised in March they will be connected to the grid and get at least 10mgw of electricity

On renewable electricity, he said there was a solar farm with 200MW, while Tanesco had a subsidiary company that would be issuing geothermal electricity soon.

“As you all know we are also going to increase the hydro power through Julius Nyerere project, Rusumo’s about 45MW among others.”

Stressing that there were no generation or transmission challenges but only the distribution problem mainly caused by maintenance that was causing the power outages.

“Our capacity is 1600mgw but in just three weeks we have hit the peak with our usual capacity increasing by three times with just yesterday the consumption was 1273.42 a thing that has never happened,” he said.