The Sunday News
THE Rural Electrification Agency has said the installation of a new electricity technology called Single Wire Earth Return (Swer) in Matabeleland region is on course and is likely to be completed in August.
The Swer technology is a cost effective grid electricity technology which uses a single wire for electricity distribution, fewer electricity transmission poles and disk insulators than the conventional system.
REA public relations and marketing executive Mr Johannes Nyamayedenga said they had completed installing the equipment in Binga while construction of the grid in Beitbridge was under way.
“We successfully completed constructing the grid in Binga on 10 April. What is left now is for Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority to connect power to the grid,” said Mr Nyamayedenga.
He said the project covered 44 kilometres and power would be connected to four primary schools, one secondary school and a clinic.
“Power will also be connected to one chief’s homestead, one police station and two business centres in Binga,” said Mr Nyamayedenga.
He said they were also running a similar project in Beitbridge’s Swereki area.
Mr Nyamayedenga said they were going to connect to the grid various schools, clinics and business centres in Swereki area.
He was hopeful that the project would be completed by August.
The rollout comes after a successful completion of a pilot project of the new technology undertaken by the agency in Mudzi district, Mashonaland East, in 2013.
Mr Nyamayedenga said all the provinces were going to identify areas where they could roll out the project.
Mr Nyamayedenga said Swer was easy to implement and was very cheap and could cover a lot of ground in a very short space of time.
“The first of its kind in Zimbabwe, is fast to implement and cheaper as compared to the conventional system,” he said.
“With this technology, we save about 40 percent material of what we could have incurred on a conventional system.”
Mr Nyamayedenga said while the conventional electrification was ongoing, REA had also embarked on other renewable energy technologies such as solar and biogas energy.
He said this was to ensure that all the homesteads, schools, clinics and any public institution in the rural areas of Zimbabwe had access to one form of energy or the other.
The Swer pilot project was initiated through Power Institute for East and Southern Africa (PIESA), a regional power co-operation of 10 countries drawn from East and Southern Africa.
