President Cyril Ramaphosa huddled the nation for a ‘family meeting’ on Monday evening and laid out his 10-point power plan to end rotational loadshedding.
Highlights from Ramaphosa’s ‘family meeting’
The president conceded that a new plan is needed to confront Eskom’s perpetual woes after 15 consecutive years of power outages due to the dilapidating state of South Africa’s energy infrastructure.
In its current form, South Africa’s energy infrastructure has capacity to produce 46 000MW of electricity. In 2022, however, with the average age of power stations being 35 years, Eskom can only peak its output at 32 000MW, and that’s pushing it.
“As a result of this, Eskom deferred essential maintenance to keep the lights on, which is causing breakdowns and failures now. The performance of some of Eskom’s power stations have been further worsened by extensive theft, fraud and sabotage,” the president claimed.
The escalated power outages that rocked the nation two weeks ago were the final wake-up call, Ramaphosa admitted. Several contributing factors, including sabotage, led to Eskom’s loss of 18 000MW of energy, and in response, Ramaphosa set out a number of interventions to, in his own words, end loadshedding.
First and perhaps, of utmost importance, is improving the performance of Eskom’s existing fleet of power stations. Then, the power utility will develop means to procure alternative energy from the private sector. However, before external players can be connected to the grid, regulations that make it extremely difficult to participate in the energy sector will either be repealed or loosened.
Also, Ramaphosa revealed that new policy models will be introduced to encourage businesses and households to invest in rooftop solar power.
Here is Ramaphosa’s 10-point power plan to end loadshedding
Here is the gist of Ramaphosa’s 10-point power plan to end loadshedding:
NOTE: A portion of these pointers were extracted from an article published by Fin24.
- License requirements for private energy projects requesting access to feed power up to 100MW into the grid will be scrapped.
- Eskom will purchase electricity from independent power producers.
- The power utility will import energy from Botswana and Zambia
- Municipalities will be allowed to source electricity independently.
- New generation capacity procured through Bid Window 6 will be doubled from 2 600MW to 5 200MW as soon as possible.
- Eskom will begin constructing its first solar and battery power storage systems at several power stations, adding 500MW to existing capacity.
- The National Energy Crisis Committee has been established to overlook the provision of electricity in South Africa. The committee is chaired by Presidency Director-General Phindile Baleni.
- Special legislation will be tabled in Parliament to expedite the approval process for independent energy projects.
- Eskom will receive further bailouts until National Treasury presents a proposal to deal with the power utility’s multi-billion-rand debt bill.
- Businesses and households will be encouraged to install solar power systems and connect them to the grid.