Zesa in power purchase agreement
http://www.theindependent.co.zw/
Thursday, 02 June 2011 19:30
ETHANOL fuel company, Green Fuel, is on the verge of concluding a power
purchase agreement with Zesa which will see 18,5 megawatts of electricity,
enough to power the entire Manicaland province, being fed into the national
grid from the company’s ethanol plant in Chisumbanje.
The agreement represents the first major private sector power injection into
the national grid. Green Fuel is the first large-scale ethanol producing
factory in Africa and the plant itself is new technology within Zimbabwe.
The electricity generation is a by-product of Green Fuel’s core business,
which is the production of ethanol fuel from sugar cane. The Chisumbanje
plant puts Zimbabwe at the forefront of renewable fuel on the African
continent.
Green Fuel General manager Graeme Smith revealed that the power feed is
pencilled for commencement this winter, with an initial offload of 18,5
megawatts from the first ethanol plant at Chisumbanje, to be commissioned
soon. The electricity will be generated from bagasse, a by-product of
ethanol production, in a way similar to how coal-fired electricity is
generated. Bagasse is the fibre left over after the juice has been squeezed
out of sugarcane stalks.
The bagasse from cane at Chisumbanje will be fed into the boiler to burn and
generate electricity in sufficient quantities to power Green Fuel’s ethanol
plant with the excess then being fed into the Zesa power distribution
system.
“We are hoping to start the power feed this July with an output of 18,5
megawatts after the commissioning of our ethanol plant. We are also
concluding power purchase arrangements with Zesa for three of these bagasse
fuelled power plants in the next phase of our ethanol project –– two at
Chisumbanje and one at Middle Sabi –– bigger in capacity, each with an
output of 35 megawatts, to put our total power offload into Zesa at 120
megawatts,” Smith said.
“Further to this, our associate company, Boabab Energy, is set to put up
between five and 10 of these power stations –– to be coal fired. We have
built one power station already at Chisumbanje, and managed to build the
components locally –– we are therefore confident of a successful rollout
programme for these coal-fuelled power stations throughout other parts of
the country where we have coal deposits,” Smith added.
For the past 18 months, 800 Green Fuel technicians have been working around
the clock in the construction phase of the plant to ensure that it will be
operating by this winter, ready to start processing over 5 000 hectares of
sugarcane into high quality anhydrous ethanol.
There are three phases to the current Ethanol plant
and three phases to the overall project development, being the construction
of three Ethanol Plants. The current phase of the first plant will require 11 500ha and will produce 350 000 litres a day of ethanol for 300 days, which equates to just over a 100 million litres annually. Phase two will progress to 150 million litres a year and 250 million litres in phase three.
The backbone of the whole project lies in vast swathes of cane grown on
Chisumbanje and Middle Sabi estates, ahead of the plant commissioning this
year. A total 5 000ha of sugar cane have been planted to date at Chisumbanje and Middle Sabi.
Sugar cane ethanol is a success story in many countries worldwide — from the US and Brazil to Europe, China and the Far East — and is considered to be the fuel of the future. Worldwide ethanol production in 2009 reached over
75 billion litres, representing a 64% increase in two years.
The production and use of ethanol benefits the economy on many levels from
job creation and employment in agriculture and technology, to the
availability of clean, renewable, affordable fuel at the pump.