Eskom’s plan to secure 1 000MW proves its executives are ‘the blind leading the blind’

Eskom’s plan to procure 1 000 megawatts of additional electricity on an urgent basis to reduce the impact of load shedding is, according to experts, a “low-hanging fruit which should have been picked a very long time ago”, and proved the power utility’s executives were “the blind leading the blind”.

The state-owned power utility has announced the launch of three programmes to procure much-needed power for the national grid. It said the programmes would focus on generators capable of supplying more than one megawatt, with the threshold lowered to enable smaller producers to participate over time.

Dr Alex Lenferna, secretary of the Climate Justice Coalition and a campaigner with 350Africa.org, said the plan was evidence Eskom had excess energy available from independent power producers, which had been curtailed by how much they feed into the grid.

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“Implementation is where things tend to fall short,” he said. “In some ways this is not too complicated. Eskom said they should be able to move forward with some elements within the space of even a week in terms of securing agreement.

“So I think we need to hold them to their word because we’ve had many announcements in the past. But it shouldn’t be too hard to finalise. One hopes it should be done within a month or two – if they can just get their act together.”

He said Eskom and the government had failed to make the right decisions for decades, which meant South Africa would not get out of this mess in quickly.

“And so it is going to take us some time to get out of the energy crisis that we’re in,” he said. “It’s important for people to buckle down and be prepared for a pretty rough year of load shedding before things start getting better.”

Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse’s Wayne Duvenage said Eskom needed to be far more transparent with its plan and take the public into its confidence because this wasn’t a quick-fix issue.

“This is a long-term problem … without maintenance for decades, this is the price we pay – and this is not only at Eskom. If you look at local governments – water, roads – these are things that unless you constantly spend money maintaining the infrastructure, it falls apart and becomes very costly to repair.”

The Economic Freedom Fighters called for the immediate firing of Eskom’s board, including “the incompetent and useless chief executive officer André de Ruyter and chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer”.

‘Eskom crisis is man-made’

The party said Eskom did not have a plan to keep the lights on, while “the lie perpetuated by [its] incompetent executives and so-called energy analysts is that the country does not have enough renewable energy to provide electricity when there is mechanical breakdown and maintenance, and that Eskom is cash-strapped”.

“The reality is that the crisis facing Eskom is man-made.”

Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen said the party had been running an implementation tracker of the Energy Response Plan, and there was “no part of the plan that is on track”.

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“This is largely due to a lack of urgency, with no measurable targets or clear timelines attached to any of the project deliverables. The most urgent short-term goal was to improve the operational performance of Eskom’s existing fleet of power stations, but this plant maintenance process has clearly derailed.”

– reitumetsem@citizen.co.za