ZESCO says it has been compelled to reduce generation at its major power stations resulting in a national capacity deficit of 560 Megawatts.
In a statement, ZESCO says the reduction in generation has been necessitated by the low water levels in its reservoirs as a result of the poor rainfall experienced during the 2014/2015 rain season.
This therefore means that load shedding will be carried out on a rotational basis throughout the day, every day, in different areas.
ZESCO says this exercise will affect all its customers.
To mitigate this deficit, ZESCO says it is making every effort to try and secure some imports from the region.
However due to the limited availability of power in the whole region, there may be times when we will not be able to secure imports to cushion the impact of load shedding.
ZESCO is therefore appealing to its customers to join the campaign to save power by using electricity as efficiently as possible and help reduce the impact of load shedding by turning off all non-essential appliances.
The load shedding schedules will be circulated through the print media and the ZESCO website.
This is surprising a country with 14million people with only about 40 percent of its population using power still failing to meet that demand, its a shame. Look at Cities like New York with its population amounting to about 2 times that of entire zambia yet with no issues of load shedding. Food of thought for ZESCO!