- The “Espinha Dorsal” (“Backbone”) Project, of around 1,400 kilometres of electricity transmission line from Tete to Maputo, will be managed by a new company crossing the central province of Sofala and the southern provinces of Inhambane and Gaza.
The announcement was made on Monday, in Maputo, by the CEO of the publicly owned electricity company, EDM, Francisco Inroga, during the launch of the corporate identity and institutional image of the National Energy Transmission Company (STE), a company created and 100 percent owned by EDM, under the National Energy Strategy.
The strategy aims to guarantee universal access to electricity, to strengthen Mozambique’s position as a regional power generation pole and to diversify the national energy matrix to contribute to the country’s industrial and socio-economic development.
According to the Maputo daily “Notícias”, citing Inroga, the STE focus is to transport electricity safely and with good quality, thus reducing the levels of losses of this resource during transmission.
It is also the goal that the visual and corporate identity of STE should transmit confidence and credibility to the various players in the sector, partners such as the World Bank, Norway, the African Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank and the OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID), which, from the beginning, have guaranteed investment for the Tete-Maputo line.
“We also want to safeguard the reputation and good name of this energy sector entity, giving it a coherent and differentiated graphic and visual typography, so that the STE project is easily identified in the spheres of energy business and public opinion”, he said.
The government approved, in early 2016, the priority allocation of gas from the Pande/Temane fields (in Inhambane) to the Temane Thermal Power Plant (CTT) project, with a capacity of 450 megawatts. In order to establish the vehicle for transmitting the electricity to be produced at Temane, the development of the Temane-Maputo section, called the Temane-Maputo Transmission Line Project (TTP), which constitutes phase 1 of the Backbone, was prioritized.
Based on this, EDM created STE to develop and execute, in a first phase, the Temane-Maputo 400 kV line project and, in a later phase, the Tete-Maputo line, also at 400 kV.
The Temane-Maputo transmission project consists of the construction of the 400 kV line between Temane and Maputo and three new substations, at Vilankulo, Chibuto and Matalane and the extension of the Maputo substation, which is already in operation.
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
Source: AIM
