15/09/2026
*Beyond the Panels: How Itimpi II Is Changing Lives in Kitwe*
“As a community, we are beneficiaries of a maternity wing being constructed through this solar plant,” says Sailas Lungu, a local community leader, as he lists what has changed since the solar plant arrived.
There's a police relief vehicle now patrolling the area. A once-battered access road has been rehabilitated. “CEC is a good company that cares about people's problems,” he says simply.
It is the kind of testimony that does not usually make it into a story about megawatts and grid capacity, but for the people living around Copperbelt Energy Corporation's (CEC) new Itimpi II Solar Plant in Kitwe, it is the part that matters most.
Commissioned on April 30, 2026, by President Hakainde Hichilema, the 136MW facility cost US$125.8 million to build and is now Zambia's largest operational solar plant.
But solar projects like this one usually leave a thin footprint once construction wraps — jobs created during the build tend to disappear the moment the panels start producing power. Itimpi II has been different. It kept 100 permanent jobs on site, and along the way, it changed how people think about what a power project owes the community around it.
Kapula Mtonga is one of the people who stayed on.
A Copperbelt University graduate trainee turned full-time solar engineer, she describes the project as the place where classroom theory became something real. “It helped me understand the engineering I learned in school and actually implement it on-site,” she says, describing everything from design drawings to watching the transformers go live and tie into the national grid. She hopes it is just the start of a career in renewable energy.
TBEA SunOasis HR Manager Chama Chanda saw the scale of that opportunity up close. At its peak, the project employed around 1,700 people, most of them Zambian, many of them local. “For me, it hasn't really been about the panels,” she says. “It has been about how many people we have employed during this period.”
That's the thread running through CEC's approach: build power infrastructure, but build it in a way that leaves something behind. CEC Chief Financial Officer Mutale Mukuka frames it as a two-part mission: deliver the electricity the country badly needs, and be a genuine partner to the communities hosting the investment. “Overall, we see an improved quality of life for the citizens of the communities in which we operate,” he says.
Zambia has added over 1,400MW of generation capacity in under five years, and solar now makes up roughly 18% of the national mix, up from under 3% just five years ago. Itimpi II pushes CEC's total solar contribution to 230MW, part of a national push toward 10,000MW by 2030.
But talk to Lungu, and the numbers fade into the background.
What stays with him is a maternity wing rising from the ground, a safer road, and a police vehicle on patrol — proof, he says, that a power plant can also be a neighbour.
