The Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) says Malawi still needs more and continuous rains up to end of April for Lake Malawi to harvest enough water for use in electricity generation by the corporation during the dry season.<\/p>\n
Escom public relations officer, George Mituka, said on Monday that pond levels at power stations are presently at levels where Escom is able to sustain generation as recent rains have enabled the Shire River to receive enough flows from its tributaries.<\/p>\n
He said Escom, alongside other stakeholders, is currently regulating the flow of water from Lake Malawi through Shire River at Liwonde Barrage.<\/p>\n
Mituka said, however, that if the current dry spell persists for another two weeks, Escom may start relying on water from Lake Malawi sooner than planned, a situation which will work against its plans of accumulating enough water in the lake for use during the dry season.<\/p>\n
He was, however, doubtful that the country may continue to receive heavy rains.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith the pace at which Lake Malawi is building, it is doubtful that the lake will build to our expected levels, unless we have continuous rains up to April,\u201d said Mituka.<\/p>\n
According to Mituka, data so far indicates that the levels in Lake Malawi are the lowest this year, with the lake registering around 470 meters above sea level at the onset of the rains as opposed to last year when it registered 475 meters above sea level.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are currently releasing just under 200 cubic meters per second as compared to the 264 cubic meters per second required for optimum operations at the power stations,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMuch as Escom is regulating the outflow from Lake Malawi, Shire River accounts for between 10 and 20 percent of cause of the lake levels to drop,\u201d said Mituka.<\/p>\n
He also said 80 to 90 percent of the reduction in lake levels is caused by evaporation, which is uncontrollable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) says Malawi still needs more and continuous rains up to end of April for Lake Malawi to harvest enough water for use in electricity generation by the corporation during the dry season. Escom public relations officer, George Mituka, said on Monday that pond levels at power stations are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20708"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20713,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20708\/revisions\/20713"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}