Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe has doubled down on claims he made earlier this month that SA’s crippling power crisis can be fixed in under a year.
But he said that for this to happen the country would have to push ahead with the government’s controversial plans to procure about 1,200MW of power from Turkish company Karpowership.
Speaking at an ANC energy dialogue in Pretoria on Wednesday, Mantashe outlined his four-pronged plan to bring an end to the country’s immediate energy crisis within six to 12 months.
The four solutions he mentioned are bringing energy from ship-mounted gas-fired power plants online, importing electricity from neighbouring countries, speeding up plans to increase the operational efficiency of Eskom’s fleet of power stations, and addressing the skills shortage at Eskom.
“Those four interventions will quickly take us out of the energy emergency [within] anything between six and 12 months.
“But if there is no commitment [to implement these solutions], it will not go as fast as that,” said Mantashe.
In March 2021, Karpowership won the lion’s share of the government’s emergency power tender to procure 2,000MW of power.
However, the deal has been the subject of multiple legal battles, which have challenged the environmental effect of the powerships as well as the cost and the 20-year duration of the contract.
Mantashe suggested that the contracts could perhaps be reduced to 10 years to make the deal more palatable to those who have objected to it.
Karpowership “was an emergency solution that remains available, but then people said the 20 years is too long. If we can get [it down to] 10 years it will be okay, but it will then cost us more per unit of power. It will be expensive but cheaper than the cost of load-shedding to the economy.
Mantashe was critical of the plan announced by the Eskom board and executives on Sunday to bring about 6,000MW back online over the next 24 months by improving the energy availability factor (EAF) of the coal-fired fleet.
Mpho Makwana, Eskom’s chair, told journalists on Sunday that they had a generation recovery plan to improve the EAF — a measure of the amount of energy being generated against the total installed generation capacity of Eskom’s entire fleet — from the current 58% to the targeted 70%.
Work is under way to improve EAF to 60% by the end of March, then to 65% by March 2024 and 70% a year later.
Urgency
“I listened to the board of Eskom saying it will work to improve the EAF to 70% by end-2024. My argument is that this does not reflect [the] urgency [to solve] the crisis,” said Mantashe.
According to him, if Eskom directed sufficient resources and skills towards the service and maintenance of its power stations, it could “accelerate the process of coming out of load-shedding”.
Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan supported Mantashe’s view that Eskom’s recovery plan could be sped up.
If all the “supporting mechanisms” that Eskom and the government were putting in place through structures such as the national energy crisis committee “come together in the next five to 10 days”, the two-year recovery plan could be shortened, Gordhan said.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.