Zambia Electricity Supply Corporation

Zambia Electricity Supply Corporation
legal form	State company
founding	1970
Seat	Lusaka
Branch	Energy industry
Website	www.zesco.co.zm

Zambia Electricity Supply Corporation (ZESCO) is the operator of the power plants in Zambia and one of the electricity distributors. It is 100 percent government owned but operates like a private company.

Electricity has been around in Zambia since 1906 when a small thermal power station was built at Livingstone to power the city. It was not until 1938 that a hydroelectric power plant was built in the third gorge below the Victoria Falls . Thereafter, with the increasing copper production, further, independent thermal power plants were built. The power supply remained a local issue.

The first initiative to connect the grids was in the 1950s, when four power plants with 120 MW output were linked together in a station in Kitwe . The next important step in 1956 was the 220 kV line from the Zambian part of the Copperbelt to the Shaba Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo . The decisive step was the construction of the Kariba dam between 1956 and 1962, after the generators on the southern side of the dam started operating.

Kariba was operated by Central Africa Power Corporation (CAPCO), a company jointly established by Southern and Northern Rhodesia . They built a 2,700-kilometer 330-kV line in the Copperbelt with substations in Leopard Hills and Kabwe . The construction of the Kafue Dam from 1967 to 1973 with only 600 MW, now 900 MW, finally made electricity in Zambia a national and generally available energy source. Everything else became primarily a question of expanding the pipeline network, even if the hydropower plant under the Victoria Falls was expanded by 60 MW in 1969 and 108 MW in 1972.

To this day, the pipeline network mainly supplies the developed regions of the country between Mongu , Livingstone, Lusaka and Copperbelt. There are also some isolated small networks of tiny hydroelectric power plants in the Chishimba cases , the Musondafällen , on Lusiwishi and on Luanza in the north and two more hydropower plants on the Mulungushi and on Lunsemfwa for Kabwe. It stayed that way until 2006. A new line to Chavuma was only laid when oil and gas deposits were discovered there in 2006 - that took six months.

Zambia Electricity Supply Corporation was founded in 1970 as a semi-public company. In 1996 their relationship with the state was redefined. It is led by a board appointed by the government, which in turn consults the private sector and allows them to participate in the appointment. None of this changes the fact that ZESCO is still one of the most important sources of money for the Zambian governments, which finances everything possible with the income, especially with the considerable export income of over 400 MW per year, except for the nationwide expansion of the pipeline network and the use of the abundant hydropower. The Zambian electricity prices are the highest in the region. A balance sheet was not publicly available until 2006.

Electricity consumption in Zambia in 2002
sector	consumption
Private customers	888,353 MWh
shops	121,253 MWh
Industry	739,693 MWh
social facilities	150,334 MWh
Mining	2,739,094 MWh
Total consumption	4,640,729 MWh