Power Giants, GNEE China partnership to improve electricity generation in Zimbabwe

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A historic partnership between a local energy-diversified firm, Power giants Africa, and GNEE China is expected to see improved electricity generation in Zimbabwe.

Power Giants Africa is in the electricity transmission as well as high voltage substation construction and maintenance while GNEE China specializes in renewable energy systems, particularly solar and wind power.

“The partnership between the two parties is expected to improve the generation of electricity in the country. Many people are experiencing power outages so we decided to collaborate with Power Giants who specialize in grid transmission. We will be using our expertise, the Chinese expertise, which is state of the art and the fastest method to build and start generating electricity,’ said  Zhou Shang Wang, the GNEE China Representative.

The partnership is a result of the country’s engagement and re-engagement drive that continues to bear fruit and is expected to add 4000MW to the national grid. The second Republic’s investor-friendly policies have seen more foreign companies exploring investment opportunities and partnering with local firms.

“Transmission is a key enabler of clean generation as the Lines and Substations need to be built first to encourage investments in generation. However, there has been limited attention to readying the grid through upgrades of existing transmission lines and sub-station and expansion of the Grid. As a result, Transmission has become a major bottleneck, not only in Developing Countries but also in their developed counterparts, including countries like the Western Nations which have seen the accumulation of 930 Gigwatts of clean generation “Queued Up” waiting for transmission to be built.

“To prioritize upgrading and expansion of the transmission grid, there is a need to adopt a more holistic system-wide view from a long-term perspective and develop a methodology as an enabler of clean generation. Such a methodology can be devised around a composite generation-transmission optimization model. This idea sets the context within which, “Green Transmission” needs to be viewed and further proposes a modeling framework that brings together the critical elements in generation and transmission planning, including system security constraints as a mixed-integer linear programming problem.

“The model formulation attempts to strike a reasonable balance between the technical rigor of a network model and computational tractability. With the Merger of GNEE and Power Giants Africa, implementation details such as making the planning period sufficiently long to elicit the value of transmission and generation,” said Engineer Edzai Kachirekwa, the Chief Executive Officer of Power Giants Africa.