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Not everyone has made the switch to energy-saving lights

Jeffrey Gogo
Five months after Zimbabwe’s sweeping declaration that inefficient light bulbs were no longer permissible, as an energy conservation strategy, the economic benefit remains as yet a matter of conjecture. And that’s partly because not everyone has made the switch to energy-saving lights, and also, perhaps, due to a lack of a mechanism to measure progress.

There is little doubt that in an electricity-short Zimbabwe the decision by energy regulator Zera to ban power-guzzling light bulbs in May was a master-stroke. Zera chief executive Gloria Magombo sounded enthusiastically optimistic at the time. She projected up to 40 megawatts of saved electricity off demand from improved efficiency mainly in households, businesses and schools’ lighting systems.

So, what’s changed in five months? Mrs Magombo isn’t any less eager. And neither is she any more hopeful. But she appears frustrated the law wasn’t doing enough to deter those found wanting over the ban in trade of energy-inefficient lights like Thomas Edison’s filament bulb, and fluorescent tubes, implemented as part of efforts to conserve energy.

Since May 1 when the ban came into force, the Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (Zera) has pressed charges against four large and small retailers for selling prohibited merchandise, but only one was ever successfully prosecuted.

Union Hardware, a large hardware and building materials supplier with over four stores in Harare, was fined just $200 – the equivalent of roughly 400 incandescent bulbs of several times the energy demand potential – when a Zera blitz rounded up retailers, confiscating 5 000 wasteful lights.

Biscuit Company, Bolingo Ltd, and Ramazan and Family Ltd, the three other defaulting companies, are still appearing before the courts, Mrs Magombo told The Herald Business, by email, unsure whether the outcome would be any different from the Union Hardware’s one.

The four prosecutions are the first such attempt by Zera to bring to justice retailers and wholesalers who continue to stock inefficient lights under a new law that promises to jail offenders for up to six months, with the option of a fine. Thus, the right precedent will be key to making the ban of effect. So far, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

But this wasn’t Zera’s biggest catch. The biggest was of 100 000 traditional bulbs of capacity 100 watts each, impounded at a holding facility called Bak Storage in Harare, with support from tax collector Zimra and the police.

Mrs Magombo said the Bak Storage raid equalled 10 megawatts of electricity demand, enough to power a small town like Rusape. The loot was eventually crushed to dust at a dumpsite in the capital city, she said.

There is no indication as to whom the bulbs seized belonged. But the size of the confiscated inventory demonstrates the scale of the amount of energy likely to go to waste from using inefficient old style lights, something a country always at risk of being switched off by external power suppliers couldn’t afford.

Mrs Magombo’s plan was built around replacing more than one million incandescent lights in about 164 000 homes, hoping to achieve the twin benefits of responsible environmental stewardship and economic growth – up to 42MW of saved energy each year that could be used in the mining, agriculture and manufacturing sectors.

Banning energy-inefficient bulbs should help ease the country’s power crisis, Mrs Magombo says, which at its worst in 2015, left thousands of homes without electricity for 18 hours a day, and cut industrial production in manufacturing and agriculture by over 55 percent.

She was looking to a switch that could have a dramatic impact on Zimbabwe’s climate change goals, preventing the equivalent of 1 300 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over the next 13 years, according to the Government’s plan drawn up under the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Ultimately, the goal was to push the 600 000 electricity consumers in Zimbabwe to give up the more familiar but inefficient filament bulbs. So, to do this, the Zera chief executive needed a law that would support a total blackout in the “importation, distribution or sale of inefficient lighting products”.

Dumping

Mrs Magombo got what she wanted. But once the energy regulator started to follow through on the implementation they found that big shop owners in Harare had begun to dump traditional bulbs on small towns to evade both losses and arrest. That means while everyone else in the big city was going LED or compact fluorescent, the recommended electricity savers that can burn for up to 5 years, the little guys out of town were lagging behind.

“The Authority has, however, noticed that some small retailers, mostly outside Harare, were still selling incadescent bulbs,” she rued, via email. “Chances are that they could have been dumped to them by some unscrupulous suppliers from the big cities, when they realised that they are no longer allowed to sell them.”

This needed not be. In coming up with the ban, Zera avoided the pitfalls of a law that would otherwise shock and awe, preferring instead a more flexible system allowing traders a three-month transitional period to replace their old stock of conventional lights with the newer kind of bulbs. The painful adjustment of shock and awe would have precipitated dumping.

Perhaps, these are simply the bad apples in a basket that also pits the likes of supermarket chains OK Zimbabwe and Pick and Pay, which have won praise from Mrs Magombo for heeding the ban.

Now, its three months before year-end, the time when Zera expected the change over to have finalised, or at least be somewhere in the regions of completion, and Mrs Magombo has dropped palpable strong intentions to beef up action in enforcing the ban.

She spoke of recruiting more foot-soldiers to carry out random inspections countrywide, confiscating banned stock and prosecuting offenders, with support from the Zimbabwe Republic Police.

At a time the country is spending millions of scarce US dollars each month to import electricity from South Africa and Mozambique to keep the economy going, Zera’s efforts could do better with a more supportive justice system.

Experts say the light emitting diode (LED), for example, consumes just 15 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per year when used for eight hours a day, costing $1,50 on average annually, while an incandescent bulb uses 130 kWh – making it nearly nine times as expensive to run.