Zambia's copper ambition is an electricity problem. Start by measuring the electricity.
The country wants 3 million tonnes of copper by 2031 from a 2025 base near 890,000 — and Copperbelt Energy Corporation has estimated that supporting that expansion needs roughly 10 GW of new generation and about USD 12 billion of energy investment by 2030. Meanwhile ZESCO has been running an eight-hour daily load-shedding schedules, industrial users on the Copperbelt have been told to shift production off-peak, and open access has changed who is allowed to sell you power in the first place. Every one of those pressures resolves into the same question on your own site: what does a tonne cost in kWh, and are you being billed for what you actually took?
You used to have one electricity supplier. Now you have a portfolio.
Zambia's Electricity (Open Access) Regulations, 2024 let qualifying participants use the transmission and distribution networks for their own transactions — and the mining sector moved quickly. The Energy Regulation Board has recorded direct supply agreements including GreenCo Power Services with First Quantum (30 MW), Kanona Power with Konkola Copper Mines (100 MW) and roughly 90 MW arrangements involving Sinomine Kitumba, while import arrangements from South Africa of up to 250 MW have been announced, starting at 125 MW with GreenCo and First Quantum financing.
That is a genuinely different commercial world. Under a single-utility tariff, energy was an overhead you argued about once a year. Under open access, energy is a portfolio of contracts, each settled on metered quantities — and the meter is now the instrument that decides who is right.
Mining is the load
Around 60–65% of national electricity is consumed by large-scale mining — 9,785 of 15,471 GWh in the ERB's 2025 Energy Sector Report. Mining consumption reportedly rose from about 4,650 GWh to 9,785 GWh between 2024 and 2025. When your sector is the grid's biggest customer, your metering discipline is a national issue as well as a private one.
Shedding is the present tense
ZESCO's schedules rotate outages by area through the working day, and hydrology sets the relief. A major Copperbelt operator has been reported running backup generation at six-figure daily cost. Whatever that figure is on your site, it deserves a measurement rather than an estimate.
Off-peak is an instruction
Copperbelt industrial users were told to shift production to off-peak hours. You cannot shift what you cannot see: which circuits draw what, at which hour, for which product. That load profile is the difference between complying on paper and actually saving money.
Four numbers that change decisions.
- Energy per tonne. kWh per tonne milled, hoisted, pumped or smelted — by line, by shift, by ore type. It is the only energy metric that survives a change in production volume, and the only one a mine manager and a CFO can argue about in the same units. When it drifts, something mechanical is usually drifting with it (see condition monitoring).
- Settlement verification. Independent metering at your intake and at the boundary points that matter, reconciled against every supplier's invoice — ZESCO, an open-access trader, an IPP under a direct PPA. We do not sell you electricity and we do not sell meters for a supplier, which is exactly why our numbers are useful in a billing dispute. This is the same independent-verification pattern we run on prepaid water fleets, applied to power.
- The true cost of self-generation. Litres in, kWh out, run-hours, starts and fuel losses across the genset fleet, expressed as a cost per kWh against your grid tariff — and then as a cost per tonne of product. Detail and diesel-fleet management live on the generator and power monitoring page.
- Critical-load continuity. Ventilation, dewatering pumps, furnaces and cold rooms are not ordinary load. Monitoring watches supply state and backup readiness on exactly those circuits, alarms when continuity is threatened, and records how each shedding window was ridden out — evidence you can take to a supplier, a regulator or your own board.
What we bring: The measurement layer, and only that — we are not an energy trader, a power-purchase adviser or a meter manufacturer. Hardware pre-configured in Johannesburg, installed by your electricians or local contractors under live remote guidance, reading the instruments you already own wherever they exist, and logging through every outage on battery so the record of a shedding event is complete rather than blank.
The four numbers on one table
| Number | Where it comes from | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| kWh per tonne, grid vs genset | CT clamps per feeder + genset controller + tonnes | Whether to run the concentrator through the outage or stagger |
| Cost per tonne during the eight hours | Genset fuel and wear per kWh × kWh per tonne | The real price of the production ZESCO asked you to stagger |
| Litres per kWh per genset | Fuel level and refuelling events against load | Which set is inefficient, and where fuel goes missing |
| Availability lost to power vs to machines | Mains presence beside the loss log | The improvement project that actually pays |
Three deployments, in the order they usually pay back.
1 · Intake & boundary metering
Independent measurement where power enters and where contracts change hands. Answers the invoice question first, because that is where the fastest money usually is.
2 · Section & line submetering
Mill, crusher, pumping, compressed air, smelter — the split that turns one big bill into a ranked list, and makes off-peak shifting a plan rather than a hope.
3 · Energy tied to production
Feed the tonnage signal in — belt scale, weightometer, plant counter — and kWh becomes kWh per tonne, tracked per shift. This is the number that stays useful after the crisis passes.
Runs on the addaNet industrial IoT platform. First metering points typically live in 2–6 weeks.
Mine energy monitoring in Zambia — quick answers
Is Zambia load shedding right now?
ZESCO publishes eight-hour daily load-shedding schedules by area, and its own 2024 updates recorded rationing of about 20 hours a day at the trough of the Kariba drought; hospitals and water utilities have been exempted and Copperbelt industrial users asked to shift production off-peak. Hydrology sets the relief — the Zambezi River Authority put Kariba's usable storage at 43% at the end of August 2026 against 19.6% a year earlier — so check ZESCO's own schedule for your zone, which is the authoritative source.
What does load shedding actually cost a mine?
It is three costs stacked: lost production during the window and the restart, the premium of self-generated power (diesel kWh typically costs a multiple of the grid tariff — a major Copperbelt operator has been reported at six-figure daily cost on backup), and equipment damage from repeated hard restarts on mills, pumps and fans. Most operations can estimate the first and guess the other two. Monitoring turns all three into figures you can put in front of a board.
What is energy per tonne, and why does it matter more than the total bill?
Because the total bill moves when production moves, and tells you nothing about efficiency. kWh per tonne milled or hoisted isolates how much energy your process actually needs — so you can compare shifts, ore types and equipment states, and see the drift that signals a worn liner, a blocked screen or a failing pump before it reaches the maintenance report.
We buy power under a direct PPA now. Do we need our own metering?
We would argue yes. Under open access you are settled on metered quantities, and the meter that decides your invoice is usually your supplier's. Independent measurement at intake and boundary points costs a fraction of one disputed month, and its value is not only in catching errors — it is in being able to close a dispute quickly, with data both parties can read.
Do you sell electricity, meters or power-purchase advice?
None of the three. addanode builds the independent measurement and telemetry layer — which is precisely why our numbers are credible in a settlement conversation. We read the instruments you own, add metering only where a measurement is genuinely missing, and the data stays yours, exportable in full.
Does the monitoring keep working during a shedding window?
That is the design case. Gateways are battery-buffered and log locally through the outage, then back-fill when power and connectivity return — so the record is most complete exactly across the period you will want to analyse. Solar-powered nodes are used where there is no reliable supply at all.
Primary sources
- Ministry of Energy — 'Electricity Open Access launched' (Open Access Regulations No. 40 of 2024)
- ERB — Energy Sector Report 2025, official PDF
- Copperbelt Energy Corporation — 'CEC urges accelerated energy sector development', statement (Mining Indaba, Feb 2026)
- Ministry of Mines — Three Million Tonnes Copper Production Strategy by 2031, page
- CNBC Africa (Reuters) — 'Zambia says 2025 copper production up 8%', 27 Jan 2026 (news)
- Africa GreenCo — 'ZESCO secures power supply from South Africa with GreenCo and FQM support', company release
Put a number on the eight hours.
Send an engineer your site layout, supply arrangements and genset list. We'll tell you honestly what to meter first, and what it should pay back.