He said the project would lower prices of transmission poles by 40 percent.
Hotspeck (Pvt) Ltd is a subsidiary of the Rural Electrification Agency set up to produce treated wood poles for rural electrification. Mbetsa said REA in the past relied heavily on the levy from electricity sales and funds allocated by government for its programmes, but the wood project would enable it to broaden its rural electrification project.“From 2006 to 2009 all the companies that treated wood for sale in the country exported all the poles to Zambia, Botswana and Mozambique to generate foreign currency for their survival. This resulted in our programme almost grinding to a halt,”Mbetsa said.
Currently REA has an uptake of less than 20,000 poles per year but is expected to gradually rise to about 50,000 in the next five years. The capacity of the plant stands at 100,000 poles annually.