Izinyoka-nyoka (illegal electricity connections) at Kya Sands in Johannesburg, 10 November 2020. Residents pay R250 a per shack a month to the people who connected it illegally. Eskom is losing billions of rands from these connections. Picture: Nigel Sibanda
Blackouts need not be as severe as they are now. Eskom is keeping mum about the fact it is producing just under half the electricity of what it could and that a third is being stolen or not paid for presently.
If the power utility cut off illegal connections and municipalities and people who don’t pay, the rest of the country would not have to be in the dark.
Eskom admitted to The Citizen that 30% of every spark of power is stolen or not paid for. The company attributes this loss of electricity to what it calls “non-technical losses that refer to electricity theft, nonpayment by customers”.
On average, Eskom reports generation ability at about 25 000MW with a demand yardstick of 29 000MW to 30 000MW. It is close to a 5 000MW shortfall that plunges the country into darkness.
At 30% of capacity, non-technical electricity losses consume about 7 500MW of available capacity – more than the deficit that causes load shedding in the first place.
ALSO READ: Eskom’s stolen electricity is more than the deficit which results in load shedding
Wayne Duvenage of the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse said: “The situation of electricity theft and non-payment is an issue that Eskom must tackle.”
The department of public enterprises and Eskom both failed to answer questions about what the government’s instruction is to the utility regarding correcting non-technical losses.
Duvenage added: “Their reluctance to deal with non-paying municipalities is because of the political hot potato that it has become. Not good for elections. They keep writing off past debt.”
ALSO READ: Energy experts say citizens should be able to ditch Eskom and produce own electricity
Duvenage suggested harsher laws to deal with non-technical losses: “The government should now contemplate the introduction of a new law, along the lines of treating vandalism and sabotage of the electricity grid and infrastructure as a category of treason and dealt with harshly.”
The Democratic Alliance (DA) is not convinced that an electricity department will yield better results for the country.
Ghaleb Cachalia, DA spokesperson on public enterprises, said: “Who needs an electricity minister? Just ring-fence Eskom as a state of disaster. Remove insane obstacles like localisation, BEE, preferential procurement, cadre deployment and weed out the thieves who rely on sabotage to bleed the utility.”
Cachalia also alleged that Electricity Minister Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa was not the right person for the job.
ALSO READ: Electricity ministry needed an energy engineer, not another bureaucrat
“When he was mayor of Tshwane, he pushed through a multibillion smart meter contract that was declared irregular by the auditor-general and later set aside. The smart electricity contract nearly wiped the city out, now he’s running our power supply.”
– news@citizen.co.za
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