Founder: Turnaround Talk
South Africa is now almost one month into what may be shaping up to be the most intensive year of loadshedding to date. On 27 December, South Africa passed 200 days of loadshedding with a stern warning from Eskom that there was still more pain for South Africans on the cards as the current maintenance backlog could take between 12 and 15 months to resolve.
We were then placed into Stage 6 power cuts with warnings of Stage 8 not far from economists lips. This prompted President Cyril Ramaphosa to cancel his participation at the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. The rhetoric from the ANC since then has been clear; Ramaphosa has been assuring South Africans that loadshedding relief is on the cards while Finance Minister, Enoch Godongwana led the delegation to Davos to promise the world that SA is open for business.
The ANC are saying the right things, but they have been saying the right things since 1994 with little action. What is the real truth behind the energy crisis and the attempts to resolve it?
Sins of the past
An EWN article points out that Outgoing Eskom CEO, Andre de Ruyter, feels that South Africa is living with the sins of the past when it comes to loadshedding.
De Ruyter added that the load shedding crisis that South Africans have had to brave is not a new development.
He said the government had known about it since 1998 when an energy white paper recorded that Eskom was asking for new capacity to be added on an urgent basis.
The article points out that De Ruyter and the Eskom board recently briefed Parliament’s finance watchdog Scopa on load shedding and other audit-related matters.
He presented a timeline to the committee that details how the government had known about the possibility of generation loss for decades.
Photo By: News24
De Ruyter also noted how power outages could have been avoided had Eskom not refused to sign power purchase agreements with independent power producers as far back as 2014.
“So this is the situation we are in today, that we are paying for the sins of the past and we’re paying for those sins in a very important way.”
Lack of money for diesel is also a problem
The article points out that De Ruyter said a lack of money to buy diesel is also having a negative impact.
“If we had more money available for diesel, the load shedding stages would have been reduced. I can categorically make that statement.”
He said they were now focussing on six priority power stations and anticipate they will be able to return 1862 megawatts by end of March 2023.
Photo By: Getty Images
Plans should have been made a decade ago
An EWN article points out that energy expert Matthew Cruise said the government’s plans to fix the country’s electricity struggles should have kicked in at least a decade ago.
Eskom said it considered permanently implementing stages 2 and 3 load shedding to give the public more predictability.
The article points out, however, that the utility said it’s not possible as technicians can’t guarantee that load shedding will remain at these lower levels.
Energy expert at Hohm Energy Matthew Cruise spoke on the Midday report earlier on Monday.
“This should have been a priority 10 years ago before we got to the point where we don’t have enough power to power the nation because the project needs to be put in place. They take five to seven years to build if you are going to be putting down large amounts of generation capacity. And all we seeing is generation capacity coming offline not much coming online.”
The article points out that Cruise said the government should be announcing big large procurement projects for sustainable consistent power.
“We are not seeing that so all I hope for is that at the moment we’re seeing the system breaking and that the quicker implementation of the opening up of the sector so that we can become a more privatised model like first world countries.”
