By now we can definitively say SA’s electricity crisis is over. Probably. If you can do 100 days without load-shedding then you can do 1,000 days. Eskom today has done very well to fix what it so comprehensively broke yesterday.
Success wasn’t always guaranteed though, and the magic ingredient has been leadership. I wrote when he became chair in November last year that Mteto Nyati was the real deal, and he is.
He combined with President Cyril Ramaphosa’s newly minted electricity minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, to re-energise Eskom’s deflated workforce, set reasonable maintenance targets and then met them.
At the latest measure the energy availability factor (EAF) of Eskom’s coal-burning fleet of power stations had risen to well over 60%, a year later than promised by the previous leadership but an extremely significant milestone nonetheless.
In public, Eskom and the state have been quietly delighted. In private, success has stoked old ambition and Eskom, now out of bed and walking on its own, has begun to dream again. A sleeping giant stirring is always a bit scary, but who would be brave enough to burst its bubble today?
Once you are central to the core of an economy, as Eskom is, it may be too much to expect that you not always see yourself like that. Much the same happened at airline SAA after it came out of receivership.
Still grounded, it had a board and a management and the more they chatted the more they thought, “well chaps, why don’t we fly again?” So they have, and they are buying more aircraft and expanding their routes. It’s all very exciting. What could possibly go wrong?
At Eskom, where the board was once forced to sign humiliating conditions in return for the state taking over more than R250bn of its debt, its new and confident team is reaching for the stars again. In 2022 Eskom launched a land-lease programme to make land close to its power-stations available so independent power producers could erect solar or wind or battery farms with an invaluable connection to the national grid just next door.
But lately Eskom management and the board have had one of those SAA-type chats and said, “well, what the hell, why can’t we put our own renewables on our own land?” So it’s the new plan. The leasing programme is gone and the obviously neat idea is to use its proximity to the grid where power stations feed electricity to us to create seriously cheap connections to the grid.
But it is precisely because Eskom has run out of grid that private sector renewable energy projects have run into a brick wall. Are they to be sacrificed now to a resurgent Eskom?
Ramaphosa needs to tread carefully. In the UK the new Labour government is committed to the creation of Great Britain Energy, a financing vehicle for the state to co-invest with the private sector. It will invest about £1.7bn a year to attract, hopefully, multiples of that amount into the sector. Labour is committing itself to a race for clean energy. If successful, it would have — excuse the pun — an electrifying effect on the economy and exports to a world hungry for “green” product.
But until the government finds the money to build 14,000km of new transmission lines no new project will be able to join the grid.
Eskom and its minister — Ramokgopa is now a full minister of energy & electricity — really do not want to get in the way of new private sector investment and it will take, again, leadership to get it to step back a little. The GB Energy example may be a good one to follow, and at the same time save it from a long and exhausting argument with the Treasury, which upon taking on half of Eskom’s debt insisted the utility undertake no new investments without the permission of the finance minister.
Ramokgopa is, anyway, now declaring publicly that he plans to introduce an enormous new tender for renewables — of which storage will hopefully form a far bigger share than it has so far. But until the government finds the money to build 14,000km of new transmission lines no new project will be able to join the grid. Unless, of course, they happen to be close to Eskom plant and ready grid connections.
It is a bit of misnomer that solar only works where the sun shines literally all the time. Ask the Europeans. Mpumalanga, where most of Eskom’s coal generation occurs, is sunny enough provided storage is routinely built into new projects.
Rid of minerals minister Gwede Mantashe’s deathly grip on energy, Ramokgopa is a man possessed. In addition to a huge new renewables tender he is pressing ahead with a big new nuclear power procurement — the 2019 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), designed when Mantashe was minister, proposed that a “nuclear power programme must be implemented at an affordable pace and modular scale (as opposed to a fleet approach) and taking into account technological developments in the nuclear space ... [the state must] immediately commence the nuclear build programme to the extent of 2,500MW”.
Partly the nuclear plan replaces the Inga hydro project on the Congo River. Ramokgopa says he is determined to do it and he wants Eskom to operate it. Another conversation with the Treasury looms.
As a source of clean energy nuclear may be a perfectly reasonable option today, but any plant ordered now would be technically obsolete by the time it was completed. And the Russians this time are surely out. It would be unthinkable to order a nuclear plant from a country prosecuting the invasion of a neighbouring country.
Where the 2019 IRP talks of a modular scale it probably doesn’t mean the very small new modular reactors being developed worldwide. And 2,500MW is a big number. Koeberg near Cape Town has just two 900MW reactors. So when Ramokgopa says the new nuclear plan is a done deal because the 2019 IRP is already policy he has his tongue in his cheek. But I also think he will by now have taught us not to underestimate him.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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