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A Lusaka magistrates court on 30 June acquitted former president Rupiah Banda, who had been accused of personally benefiting from a $2.5m oil deal with Nigeria’s Sarb Energy. Magistrate Joshua Banda ruled that the prosecution had failed to prove its case, and called the prosecution’s evidence inconsistent and contradictory.

Zesco has introduced load-shedding following a significant drop in water levels at Lake Kariba and Itezhi Tezhi. The Itezhi Tezhi dam, where Zesco and Tata Africa Holdings are close to completing a 120MW power station, is also the holding dam for the 990MW Kafue Gorge hydropower station. Zesco has an installed capacity of 2,200MW but is generating only 1,600MW. By end-June, Zesco is said to have lost $120m in revenues as a result of load-shedding. “We can generate power at full capacity but our hydrologists have advised that, with the amount of water we have received this year, we can run dry as early as this August and that will reduce our generation capacity to zero,” a Zesco engineer told African Energy.

The country’s difficult electricity supply situation will see load-shedding over the next two months, deputy energy, mines and water Charles Mathias Zulu said in Dubai on 9 June. Zambia Electricity Supply Corporation (Zesco) is expected to reduce its output by 300MW in June and by the same amount in July, he said, cutting maximum generation capacity to around 1.6GW – insufficient to meet the projected 1.9GW peak. “So we will be experiencing load-shedding,” Zulu told the Africa Energy Forum (AEF).

Zesco is seeking expressions of interest by 3 July for consultancy services for the rehabilitation and uprating of the Chishimba Falls hydropower scheme on the Luombe River. The utility seeks an implementation engineer to provide owners engineer services, including support during implementation/construction, commissioning and defect liability phases, and follow-up environmental and social impact mitigation measures that include conversion of the existing ‘A’ station into a museum. The consulting services will be financed by Germany’s KfW Development Bank.

Faced with a fuel subsidy of $48m a month between January and May, the government has raised the price of fuel. On 12 May, the Energy Regulation Board (ERB) announced a 15% increase in the pump price for petroleum products. “This adjustment is mainly due to the volatility of the kwacha, which resulted in the significant adjustment of the kwacha against the United States dollar,” said ERB board chairman Geoff Mwape.”

South African engineering consultancy Aurecon announced on 11 March that it had been awarded a contract to supervise the engineering, design and construction of the $210m Lusaka transmission and distribution rehabilitation project. The project – which is being funded with $105m from the World Bank’s International Development Association, €65m from the European Investment Bank and $40m from the Zambian government – became active in February 2014 and is expected to be completed in 2019.

Zambia’s Zesco has announced plans to raise up to $1.4bn on international financial markets for the $2bn, 750MW Kafue Gorge Lower hydro project, raising concerns about government debt. “We are expected to go on the open market with the help of transaction advisers and talk to sovereign countries on financing the $1.4bn,” managing director Cyprian Chitundu told a parliamentary committee. Speaking shortly before he was moved to the Ministry of Energy and Water Development, Chitundu said the transaction was planned for June. Zesco planned to issue a construction tender in around two months.

Ruling Patriotic Front (PF) candidate Edgar Lungu has won the 20 January presidential election that followed the death of former leader Michael Sata. On a turnout of just 32%, Lungu narrowly beat rival Hakainde Hichilema of the United Party for National Development (UPND), taking 48.3% of the vote to Hichilema’s 46.7%. The former defence and justice minister has pledged to continue the development projects that began under his predecessor, with the power sector to remain a critical component of the government’s development plan.

Financing totalling $135.6m has been approved for the rehabilitation of the Kariba storage hydropower scheme on the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe. The World Bank announced on 9 December that it had agreed to provide a $75m International Development Association credit to the Zambezi River Authority (ZRA), with a $25m grant to be provided by the government of Sweden to Zambia.

Results from the first major geothermal exploration and drilling programme to take place since the mid 1980s are positive, according to developer Kalahari GeoEnergy Ltd. The company, currently the only major developer active in Zambia, has been targeting the Bwengwa River area of the Kafue Trough, a 14,000km2 Karoo-era extensional sedimentary basin, in an exploratory programme expected to cost $3.5-4m. Initial mathematical simulations estimate that the target could sustain electricity production of at least 10MW, depending on the location of the reservoir, which has still to be precisely determined.

Namibia and Zimbabwe have signed a new 15-year power purchase agreement (PPA) for Zimbabwe to supply Namibia with 80MW. The PPA between NamPower and the Zimbabwe Power Company (ZPC) forms part of ZPC’s strategy to finance expansion of the Kariba South hydropower station. The capacity of the power station is 700MW now, and will rise to approximately 980MW after the expansion. The agreement signed on 16 October will become effective once the existing Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (Zesa) agreement comes to an end early in 2015.

Representatives of the governments of Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in Dar es Salaam on 30 September to facilitate a project to connect the power grids of the three countries, linking the Eastern and Southern African power pools. The ZTK Interconnector is a Southern African Development Community (SADC) priority project with a total cost estimated at around $860m, according to research by Ernst & Young in conjunction with the SADC presented in 2013. Tanzania’s minister of energy and minerals, Sospeter Muhongo, said that they hoped to complete the project by 2016.

Australian-listed Swala Energy has been formally awarded hydrocarbon exploration rights over Block 44. The company said in May that it had been offered the block and was awaiting formal confirmation (AE 277/12). Block 44 covers 6,000km2 on the margins of the Karoo-aged Kariba Basin in southern Zambia.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) plans to raise a $250m cocktail financing package to fund major rehabilitation work on structural weaknesses in the Kariba dam. Since 2012, there has been growing concern over the possible collapse of the structure on the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe.According to a preliminary assessment by the Zambezi River Authority (ZRA), about $250m is needed for emergency work to correct the structural weaknesses seen in the dam wall, whose collapse would threaten close to 4m people downstream in Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi.

The Chamber of Mines of Zambia (CMZ) has launched legal action challenging an Energy Regulation Board (ERB) decision to raise electricity tariffs for mining companies (AE 279/8). Court documents named the applicants as Lumwana Mining Company, Kansanshi Mining, Lubambe Copper Mines, Mopani Copper Mines, Chibuluma Mines, NFC Africa Mining and Chambishi Metals.