South African industrial equipment supplier Barloworld is tendering for a second large-scale electricity project in Mozambique having already secured a R250-million turnkey project to supply NamPower with a 21,5-MW diesel-fuelled peaking plant on the Namibian West Coast.

CEO Clive Thomson is confident that Walvis Bay facility will become a "reference site" for its nascent power systems division, which will focus on opportunities in the power-stressed Southern African region.

Barloworld has been contracted to engineer, procure and build the Anixas power station, which is expected to be commissioned in December 2010.

"It's the starting point," Thomson enthuses, revealing that the JSE-listed company is also working on a tender for a major project in Mozambique, while it is assessing earlier-stage opportunities in Angola.

In South Africa, meanwhile, the business was likely to focus less on major power projects to supply the grid and more on providing back-up power generation, as well as solutions to enable corporates to shift loads away from what will be increasingly expensive peak periods.

"The respite we have had from power outages in South Africa during 2009 is a function much more of declining demand than it is of increasing generation capacity . . . and as growth normalises in the Southern African environment, we believe that those bottlenecks will provide good opportunities for our power systems business," he concludes.

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