Environmental groups have scored a victory in the fight to lay bare closed discussions over Karpowership deals after the North Gauteng High Court ordered the government and its entities to hand over confidential documentation over to the Green Connection, in its bid to set aside the contracts.
On Tuesday, the court told the National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa), the mineral resources and energy minister and Eskom to hand certain documents to the NGO.
The documents include the draft power agreements to be entered into between Karpowership and Eskom. They also speak to the mechanism for dealing with the fluctuations in the international liquefied natural gas (LNG) prices and records upon which Nersa decided to approve three electricity generation licences to the Turkish firm.
The three licences for Karpowership to operate generation facilities are at the Port of Saldanha Bay, the Port of Ngqura and the Port of Richards Bay.
Some of the information Nersa will also have to hand over is minutes of meetings where Karpowership generation applications were discussed and approved. The regulator will also have to hand over expert reports it considered in arriving at decisions.
However, the Green Connection, which has built a name for itself for challenging oil and gas exploration by multinational firms, will have to commit to treat the information discreetly.
But the judge left the door open for it to apply to make the information public when its main application to set the deals aside is heard.
“Access to the confidential information shall be reserved to the applicant’s legal representatives … and the judge presiding in the main application,” reads the court order.
“The applicant reserves the right to argue at the hearing of the review that the entire rule 53 Record [a rule riggers a duty on the decision maker to deliver a record of proceedings sought to be corrected or set aside], including the information regarded as confidential by the first respondent (Nersa) and third to fifth respondents (Karpowership), be made available to the public.”
Powerships are mobile floating power plants typically deployed following natural disasters, which use LNG or another fuel source to generate electricity. They dock at ports and transmit the electricity to the mainland via cables.
Karpowership SA is the local holding company for the Turkish company, Karadeniz Holdings, which operates powerships around the world.
They won a bid to dock three powerships at the ports of Saldanha, Coega (Ngqura) and Richards Bay via a 20-year contract.
“We are quite happy today because as we came into court, we found out that Nersa had basically given up. We now have a settlement to access the information we need. Once we have this, what we believe to be crucial information, then we will be able to prepare for the next stage of the court review,” the Green Connection’s Liziwe McDaid said.
“This is a good day. The Green Connection and those who have continued to support our cause — especially the small-scale fishers who are fighting to defend their livelihoods — have been vindicated in our striving for good governance.”
Two years ago the Green Connection launched an application in the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria seeking to review and set aside the Nersa decision to grant three electricity generation licences to the Karpowership SA.
Among other grounds of the review included in the application, the Green Connection takes issue with Nersa having granted the generation licences even though the department of forestry, fisheries and the environment had refused to grant environmental authorisations for the powerships, and without Nersa taking environmental considerations into account.
The Green Connection said it had reason to believe the deals come in at a higher end of the cost spectrum and undermine SA's just transition efforts.
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