Southern Africa power pool-its benefits to the Botswana power corporation

摘要

The Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) has traditionally been meeting the national electricity demand through generation at Morupule power Station (120MW s.o.) and importing from neighbouring utilities, especially Eskom.of South Africa. Imported power has for a long time been based on long-term bilateral contracts. The contracts themselves have evolved in nature from customer captive, to cooperative and now to competitive ones. In this paper, electricity trade in Southern Africa Power Pool (SAPP) is considered, and that includes a portion of highly competitive short - term energy market (STEM). ESKOM has only freed BPC to trade 25% of its requirements in this market, because of an agreement that runs until 2007. The paper gives details of bidding and delivery at STEM and at the Bulleting Board. Savings against bilateral costs are also presented. A 25 % of import power is applied to trade at STEM for the first hour of 25 January 2002. The savings stand at ZAR 1498.95 I hr. The same procedure is applied to obtain STEM total savings for the month of December which equal ZAR 1223 257.20. The paper proposes that the bilateral agreement with ESKOM should be renegotiated with the view to requesting ESKOM to free more of BPC power imports to be traded at STEM. Such an agreement will allow BPC to boost its profit margin considerably.