Durban - President Cyril Ramaphosa, who cancelled a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos last week in order to deal with the country’s energy crisis, has warned South Africans to buckle up and ride out the load shedding storm as there were no quick fixes to the problem.
Writing in his weekly address to the nation, from The Desk of The President, Ramaphosa acknowledged the Sowetan’s hard-hitting front-page article last week. The article had listed the small businesses that had gone under due to the crippling load shedding.
He said the government was working hard to end the crisis.
“As load shedding continues to wreak havoc on businesses, households and communities, the last thing South Africans want to hear are excuses or unrealistic promises. The demands for an immediate end to power cuts are wholly understandable. Everyone is fed up,” Ramaphosa said.
He said the energy crisis has been many years in the making and had created a “perfect storm”.
“Though it may be easy to blame our present woes on dysfunctionality at Eskom, a combination of factors have contributed to the crisis. It is important to recall the reasons for the current situation so that our response tackles the causes of our crisis, not just the symptoms. Lack of investment in new generating capacity, poor power plant maintenance, corruption and criminality, sabotage of infrastructure, rising municipal debt and a lack of suitable skills at Eskom have all created a perfect storm,” he said.
A long-term sustainable solution would need to address all the factors in combination, Ramaphosa added.
“We should not make the mistakes of the past. For many years, critical maintenance was deferred, and our power stations were run too hard in order to keep the lights on. As a country, we are now paying the price for these miscalculations. We must be realistic about our challenges and about what it is going to take to fix them. While we all desperately want to, we cannot end load shedding overnight.”
During his meetings with representatives of labour, business, traditional leaders, religious leaders, premiers, metro mayors and leaders of political parties, Ramaphosa said he stressed the importance of “staying the course”, instead of coming up with unsustainable short-term solutions.
He said the national Energy Action Plan, which aimed to improve the performance of Eskom’s power stations and announced six months ago, remained the most realistic path towards ending load shedding.
“As we know only too well from the experience of the last few weeks, many of the measures in the plan will not be felt in the immediate term. That is why we are using every means at our disposal, calling on every resource we have, to get power onto the grid as a matter of extreme urgency.”
Eskom’s fleet of coal-fired power stations supplied the bulk of South Africa’s energy needs. That was why there was a singular focus in Eskom on improving plant performance, Ramaphosa said, adding that a team of independent experts was conducting a diagnosis of the problems at poorly performing power stations and taking action to improve plant performance.
“Six power stations have been identified for particular focus over the coming months to recover additional capacity. Eskom is also working to connect Kusile Unit 5 to the grid by September this year. Every urgent effort is being made to restore other units at Medupi, Kusile and Koeberg with significant capacity.”
Eskom had imported 300MW of capacity from neighbouring countries. Negotiations were under way to secure an additional 1 000MW. Eskom was also working to buy surplus power from companies, with available generation capacity for three years.
Ramaphosa said the government had signed agreements for 25 projects from bid windows 5 and 6 of the renewable energy programme. The projects would soon proceed to the construction phase. Collectively, they represent 2 800MW of new capacity.
“To increase the overall supply of electricity, in addition to what Eskom provides, we have taken steps to enable substantial investment by private power producers in new generation capacity. The licensing requirement for embedded generation projects has been removed. Since we first raised the licensing threshold to 100MW, the pipeline of private sector projects has grown to more than 100 projects with over 9 000MW of capacity. We have cut red tape and streamlined regulatory processes, reducing the timeframes for environmental authorisations, registration of new projects and grid connection approvals,” he said.
The was also light at the end of the tunnel for the government allowing businesses and households who have installed solar panels on the roofs to sell surplus electricity from rooftop solar panels into the grid.
“We can all play our part by paying for the electricity that we use. The huge debt owed to Eskom by municipalities badly affects Eskom’s ability to fund critical maintenance… While we cannot end load shedding immediately, what is certain is that if we work together, with urgency, to implement the Energy Action Plan, load shedding will steadily become less and less severe. Through collective action, we will much sooner reach the point where we have enough power to end load shedding altogether.”
IOL