President Cyril Ramaphosa’s energy response plan announced in July is “beginning to unfold”, but more attention has to be paid to maintenance and “fixing the generation side [of Eskom]”, public enterprises minister, Pravin Gordhan said.
Gordhan said in a statement released on Monday some of the interventions already implemented to deal with SA’s energy crisis include the recruitment of experienced former Eskom employees and approval for procurement of about 1,200MW of power.
However, in an interview on the Newzroom Afrika TV channel on Tuesday, he said the high number of generation unit breakdowns over the past week that led to the implementation of stage 6 load-shedding on Sunday, was “highly unacceptable”.
More than 20 generation units suffered breakdowns at various stations last week.
After two days of stage 6 the power cuts were reduced to stage 5 on Tuesday morning until further notice. There have been no further updates from Eskom since Monday to confirm the outlook for the rest of the week.
“We regret the way in which energy provision from Eskom is upsetting the economy and households […] but this is the Eskom we inherited and are trying to fix,” Gordhan said in the interview.
DA leader John Steenhuisen, said the party believes little progress has been made in implementing Ramaphosa’s interventions.
He called for the National Energy Crisis Committee, which was appointed to drive the plan and includes Gordhan and mineral resources and energy minister Gwede Mantashe, should be “immediately dissolved” and replaced by “an outside industry expert to oversee the implementation of [the plan]”.
“The most urgent short-term goal ... was to improve the operational performance of Eskom’s existing fleet of power stations, but this plant maintenance process has clearly derailed,” Steenhuisen said in a statement on Tuesday.
The Small Business Institute (SBI) has also called on government to accelerate measures to stabilise Eskom, including the removal of remaining regulatory restrictions to licensing independent power producers, and allowing entities with excess power to sell it to the national grid.
Also, the Eskom board is in need of a shake-up, said SBI CEO John Dludlu.
“It is inexplicable why government — as Eskom’s sole shareholder — has not strengthened the Eskom board with appropriately qualified directors in the face of a deepening crisis,” Dludlu said.
“If we are serious about inclusive growth, we need to urgently tackle the Eskom crisis — otherwise we should forget about creating jobs, and our long-suffering small businesses, our best hope, will continue dying in numbers,” he said.
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