Eskom Coal plant

The country’s power utility firm Eskom said it could import some electricity from Mozambique to fill a supply gap in Africa’s most advanced economy, a coal conference heard on Tuesday.

Willem Theron, business development manager of Eskom’s southern Africa transmission group, said the state-run utility planned an extra 6,250 megawatts (MW) of power could be added to two new coal-fired plants, Medupi and Kusile.

“It is assumed that some of the power can be through imports,” Theron told the conference in the Mozambique capital Maputo.

Theron said one possibility for electricity imports was Mozambique, which has enough supplies to build coal-based power stations, and Botswana.

Eskom is battling to keep the lights on in Africa’s most advanced economy and frequently has to resort to implementing power cuts to prevent the grid from being overwhelmed.