Everyone, it seems, is blaming everyone else for Eskom’s stage 6 load-shedding. People in government and in opposition are blaming mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe for erecting masses of regulatory red tape that’s preventing new private-sector generators from coming online, despite President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ambitious reform announcements of the past year.
Eskom’s shareholder, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan, is somehow managing not to shoulder much of the blame at all for Eskom’s ailing operational state, but that is probably because of the general anti-Mantashe narrative. Ramaphosa has cut short his trip abroad to come home and tackle the power crisis (again), as if his absence from home was part of the problem.
Eskom is still blaming history and the government’s not letting it start building much-needed new power stations until 2007 — and is now again keeping it out of new build, even as the power utility demonstrates daily how ill-equipped it is to run the existing power stations it built.
The fallout of prolonged stage 6 load-shedding will be dire, even worse than that of the more than 100 days of load-shedding already this year. Economists are already revising down growth forecasts yet again. Investors are looking elsewhere, so future economic growth is at risk too.
There will surely be significant political fallout too. South Africans certainly should blame and hold to account the governing ANC for the failure of Eskom and other crucial state-owned enterprises such as Transnet, not to mention of much of the state’s own infrastructure.
But at this stage (whether 6 or merely 5), the urgent priority is to fix what’s wrong, not waste time casting blame. And what is wrong is that Eskom’s power stations keep failing. The more maintenance it does the less electricity its power stations seem to produce. Five or six power station units fall over at a time, triggering more intense load-shedding in a power system that was already highly constrained. It’s hard to imagine how that happens. The energy availability factor (EAF) had already fallen into the early 60% range in 2021, which means on average almost 40% of Eskom’s capacity was out of service at any given time. Most of that was unplanned accidents, not planned maintenance. Now the EAF is well below 60%, probably closer to 50%.
Operational crisis
That is the operational crisis that has to be urgently tackled if load-shedding is even to be reduced to more manageable levels, never mind halted altogether. Much of the anger has been focused, rightly, on the paralysis in the government that has delayed or even prevented new private sector power producers from building new capacity, as they are hugely keen to do.
Mantashe and his department continue to be a big part of the problem, and that includes the National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa). The private sector stands ready to build as much as 6,000MW of new capacity in the form of “embedded generation”, where companies build for own use or to sell to other companies. That’s over and above the thousands of megawatts of new capacity the department of minerals & energy is supposed to licence in terms of the bid windows it has under way. Eskom has made it clear it supports adding the private-sector embedded generators and their new capacity to the ailing national grid as fast as possible. Most are renewable energy producers that will also help to make the national grid cleaner and greener.
Ramaphosa has since last year announced an ever more far-reaching series of reforms designed to unlock this capacity and make it quicker and easier for new generators to come online. Operation Vulindlela is working hard to remove the constraints. But it is still taking forever to open the way. Regulatory and technical obstacles must be addressed urgently. If Ramaphosa can’t get ministers and officials to do it, he should look for new ones.
Even then, this is by no means a quick fix. Estimates are that it will be 2024 or 2025 before there is enough new private-sector power capacity to halt load-shedding. SA faces a bleak couple of years unless its leaders act to fix what’s broken, and that is Eskom’s own operating performance.
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.