Several countries in the southern African region have been asking the Mozambican authorities to increase the supply of electricity to meet the demands of their economies, Mozambique’s Noticias reported.
The most recent request came from South Africa, when its minister of energy visited Maputo and met with his Mozambican counterpart, Ernesto Tonela, the paper said.
“There is nearly a structural energy deficit in the region and the partners look to Mozambique as one of the solutions in the supply of the resource,” Tonela.
Mozambique considers this scenario of regional energy deficit as an opportunity to increase revenue and reinforce its position as a pole in the production and export of energy, Tonela said.
“In our strategy of developing new generation capacities, we look not only at the need to respond to the growth in domestic demand, which, according to our projections, should grow by about 8.6 percent on average until 2043, but also at increasing the capacity to sell to countries in the region,” he said.
Several power projects, involving wind and solar plants, gas-fired and hydroelectric power plants, are being designed, the minister said.
One of the major initiatives that the government is promoting is the Temane Thermal Power Station, the largest since the country’s independence, which was initially designed for 400 megawatts but later optimized for 450 megawatts, he said.
Mozambique currently exports around 1,300 megawatts of energy to countries in the southern African region.
