Eskom assured the country that it was determined not to implement load shedding again. But it cannot do it alone.
An explosion at the Duvha power station in February has taken almost 600MW out of the system for more than a year and this means routine maintenance windows need to be rescheduled to meet electricity demand.
Eskom is launching several campaigns to achieve a voluntary electricity saving of 10%. It has targeted energy efficiency as a way to provide the reserves necessary for the maintenance windows. This winter is also expected to be colder than most and peak demand is expected to be 530MW higher than it was last year.
Malusi Gigaba, the public enterprises minister, said the growing economy also needed to be able to rely on sufficient energy. Although coal stockpiles were at a healthy level of more than 42 days, he said, “high levels of inefficient use of electricity in all sectors can no longer be tolerated”. There were demand savings of 372MW last year, 207MW of which were saved by the residential sector.
Eskom has invested R1-billion in energy saving projects for the mining sector to help reduce electricity demand while allowing manufacturing output to increase. But the commercial property sector is seen to be lagging seriously behind and Eskom is committed to reducing this with help from the South Africa Property Owners’ Association.
Eskom said it was ready to buy electricity from independent power producers and has signed up for 373MW through the medium-term power purchase programme. It is also working with the government on the renewable energy feed-in tariff programme.
But Jayendra Naidoo, of Business Leadership South Africa, has warned that decision-making on energy supply is spread across too many ministries and among too many role-players, and has stressed the need for “maximum coordination”.