Electrification of district capitals concluded

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Electrification of district capitals concluded

10:26 CAT | 19 Nov 2018

In file CoM

The electrification of all 152 district capitals in Mozambique was completed on Friday with the connection of Luabo, in the central province of Zambezia, to the national grid.

The previous day Doa district, in Tete province, was connected.

Claudio Dambe, the head of rural electrification in the publicly owned electricity company EDM, interviewed in Saturday’s issue of the Maputo daily “Noticias”, confirmed that these last two districts had been connected. Connecting Doa to the grid, he said, involved building 160 kilometre long electricity transmission line from the mining town of Moatize.

20 kilometres of medium voltage line and 16 transformer posts were also installed. The cost of this work was slightly more than 219 million meticais (about 3.65 million US dollars, at current exchange rates).

In the case of Luabo, 76 kilometres of high voltage transmission line were erected, running south from Mopeia district. 14 transformer posts and 20 kilometres of medium tension line were also installed.

For the Doa transmission line, wooden pylons were used, but EDM installed metallic pylons along the Mopeia-Luabo line – which is why it was much more expensive, at 274 million meticais.

The electrification of all district capitals was a project of the previous government, under President Armando Guebuza, and was almost completed by the end of Guebuza’s second term of office in 2014. But then the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, approved a government bill, with a new administrative division, splitting some districts into two.

14 new districts were created, raising the total number from 128 to 152. Some of these were already electrified, but Derre, Mulevala, Luabo and Doa were not, and so EDM had to draw up a further programme of electrification to cover the new districts.

Source: AIM