After a year of throwing everything at it to improve the performance of Eskom’s power stations, things are worse than before. Even with two of the three Kusile units that suffered a major breakdown in October last year now back online, Eskom’s generation performance for November has deteriorated compared with the same month last year.
With power station performance for the past eight months now sitting at 54% of installed capacity, it seems unlikely that Eskom will achieve its goal of 60% by end-March when its financial year ends.
Still, for all the focus government is placing on solving the electricity crisis, with the appointment of the national energy crisis committee, an electricity minister and even the Treasury getting involved by providing a huge bailout to create breathing space on Eskom’s balance sheet that allows for more and more effective spending on maintenance, the urgency to implement long-term solutions is lacking.
A few months after his appointment, electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa promised a mega bid window of more than 15,000MW of additional renewables. To this end, SA was promised the release of bid window 7, to procure about 5,000MW through the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Project before end-July, but this never happened.
The deadline was moved to “the fourth quarter of 2023”, but now that December is only days away it seems increasingly likely that during the worst year of load-shedding yet, not a single new megawatt will be procured through this government-backed programme.
One of the reasons for the delay is the lack of grid capacity in the Cape provinces, which have the best sun and wind resources to power renewable energy plants. There is now an awareness that large-scale transmission grid expansion needs to happen as quickly as possible.
In September, Ramokgopa hosted a transmission investment seminar to explore what options the government could consider to crowd in private sector finance for grid expansion. More than two months later, no report from this seminar has been made public, but it now seems unnecessary.
Lining up
The implementation plan for the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan (JET IP) that was recently adopted by cabinet clearly sets out the options available to allow for private sector investment in the expansion of the grid.
Investors are already lining up. All the government needs to do is to give the green light for one or more of the off-balance sheet financing mechanisms identified in the implementation plan — a plan already approved by cabinet.
At its heart, the R1.5-trillion JET IP shows a path out of the energy crisis in a way that will avoid future calamities.
The plan tells us little that we didn’t already know about what ultimately needs to be done, but it does propose solutions to get over the obstacles that are standing in the way of ending the energy crisis.
Hopefully it can propel the government out of the inertia caused by perpetual planning so that work can start on building new transmission infrastructure that will bring online the power needed to stop load-shedding, the closing down of old coal-fired power stations, and creating new economic opportunities that will offer a healthier, better life for the thousands of people whose livelihoods now rely on these very unreliable power stations.
Problem-solving
The plan is all about problem-solving, says Joanne Yawitch, head of the project management unit (PMU) responsible for implementing the JET IP.
What the PMU has done with the implementation plan is to try setting up a set of institutional arrangements that supports implementation happening in ways that integrate the work into existing and ongoing government programmes.
It provides five-year road maps for getting large-scale projects such as transmission grid expansion, the decommissioning of end-of-life coal power stations, and creating new economic opportunities around those stations, off the ground.
If implemented, it will be the starting point for much longer-term programmes.
Yawitch acknowledges that these are big infrastructure investments, the biggest SA has seen in a long time, and it will take time to plan and define.
But real progress is possible in the next five years — not only possible, but necessary because there is a real urgency and “time is not going to wait”.
It is now up to government to stop talking urgency and to show it.
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