Escom suffers nationwide system shutdown, recovers

Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) yesterday experi-enced a system shutdown that triggered a nationwide power out-age before fully restoring supply. In a public notice yesterday, the power utility said the shutdown occurred at 7.11am and a technical team was on the ground to investigate the cause. A second notice issued in the afternoon said Escom restored supply to parts of the Southern Region at 8.44am, the Central Re-gion at 9.50am and the Northern Region at 10.34am.

However, the power utility said it was still investigating the cause of the in-cident. “Our technical team is continuing to investigate the root cause of the initial system shutdown, and further updates will be shared once all facts are established,” reads part of the notice. The incident comes more than a year after another nationwide sys-tem shutdown in April 2025 that left the country without electricity for about two hours.

Following previous nationwide shutdowns, Escom said it was investi-gating their causes but is yet to publicly disclose the findings of the investigations. In an interview yesterday, Consumers Association of Malawi execu-tive director John Kapito said repeated nationwide outages with-out public explanations erode consumer confidence in Escom. The latest nationwide blackout comes barely days after Escom at-tributed shorter load-shedding hours to the recently commissioned Battery Energy Storage System which the utility said was sup-plying an additional 10 to 12 megawatts during peak demand. Malawi’s installed electricity generation capacity stands at 554.24 megawatts (MW), comprising 401.8MW from hydropower, 51.4MW from diesel-powered generation and 101MW from solar energy, ac-cording to Escom.