Jubilee Metals Group plc (LON:JLP) Chief Executive Officer Leon Coetzer caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss its Zambian operations update.
Q1: Leon, I just wanted to get some clarity around the Zambian power concerns. In the update released this morning, it highlights the risk of power outages to operations as a major concern. Is the power not secured under the private purchase agreement as announced previously?
A1: Just to clarify that on that update, what we speak of is, and as you said correctly, Jubilee Metals is very fortunate in that we have our private power purchase agreement which secures all of our electricity demands for Zambia. Because of the location of the power plant, it means that one of our operations like Sable is directly fed from this power plant. Our operation Roan, which is roughly about 250 kilometres away, it is supplied with electricity via the national grid from the private power plant.
It’s this grid that has been the challenge over the past couple of weeks where the Zambian well published has suffered tremendous outages across the national grid. The grid has become unstable and during unstable conditions, the grid is in fact stopped or the ability to transfer electricity across the grid is compromised. And that affects Roan.
It needs to operate and we continue to increase throughput through Roan but it does impact the operational uptime of Roan, specifically because these grids, the downtime is often unannounced, unexpected. That’s the area that we’re engaging with the Zambian government to ensure that at least give us forewarning so we can plan the downtime of these grid outages to reduce the impact on our copper production.
But as I said, it doesn’t mean we’re not producing. We’re producing, Sable is running normally and Roan of course is operating. It’s just impacted on its availability and that really is the impact. On the one hand, we have the power available, but it’s actually transferring that electricity to an operation such as Roan.
