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Role of Thermal Power
The Zambian economy has been growing consistently, leading to increasing demand for electricity. In particular, energy intensive industries have grown considerably, driving up base load requirements of power.
Zambia’s power sector is presently dominated by hydro-electric power, which is dependent on rainfall patterns and presently inadequate to meet the existing demand. Thermal power plants are ideally suited to fill this gap and play a vital role in meeting the base load requirements.
The growing electricity demand in the Southern African region, coupled with a generation deficit offers the opportunity to export power on the South African Power Pool leveraging on Zambia’s location and Open Access Market regime.
Power generation by MCL
The thermal grade coal, a by-product of mining at MCL, has been hitherto dumped along with overburden as waste material, causing environmental hazard due to self- combustion. This is an excellent fuel for thermal power generation which will add substantial value to the operations of the company while mitigating the environmental pollution.
In the first Phase, a mine-mouth, 300MW Coal Fired Power Plant (CFPP) was commissioned at Maamba in August 2016.
The project envisaged a Phase 2, where the capacity can be increased to 600MW, depending on the build-up of demand for power in the region.