This week Financial Insight Zambia will be official media partner at the Cape Town Africa Energy Indaba. This event will bring various leaders from both private sector and governments across Africa to discuss energy issues and policy that is impacting the continent.
Back on the home front, the energy sector continues to grapple with a number of issues that require fiscal intervention. Some are related to policy implementation delays and others relate to infrastructure legacy issues. Following the recent loadshedding crisis, fiscal has indicated its desire for diversity in energy supply and has made big pronouncements of renewable energy players set to enter the market among other “grand” initiatives.
On the policy side, the delayed development of Open Access regulations and their subsequent implementation have hampered the growth of independent power producers especially in the renewable space.
According to the Electricity Act of 2019, Open Access for all players is guaranteed however there has been a notable delay in implementing some of the concepts that would ensure more participation of the Private Sector.
According to some energy experts, some of the pertinent issues that would need to urgently be addressed include aspects of tariffs on transmission and distribution. This would also involve there being transparency in the tariffs in the market that is analogous to the model adopted by the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP).
On the infrastructure side, calls for mass smart metering implementation is an issue that has been raised. Smart metering does depend on the available infrastructure that would require upgrades on distribution nods. Therefore, some experts, we have consulted with indicated that the best approach would be to target bulk customers as they are the biggest “consumers” of energy.
The silver bullet to this would be nationwide implementation of smart metering for the sake of increasing efficiency of resource utilization. However, this would require high capital investment as well as firming up on tariff issues that may arise.