There was no national energy crisis in South Africa and the contention that the recent Western Cape power outages were impacting on investment was dismissed by Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin in Parliament on Tuesday.
Speaking to the members of parliament serving on the national assembly public enterprises, science and technology, and minerals and energy portfolio committees he also said conjecture that South Africa had effectively turned away an investor in a second aluminium smelter was not true.
He said there was only one plan for such a smelter and negotiations with Alcan were continuing over the energy contract for its plant at Coega, Eastern Cape.
Erwin noted that any company that needed significant amounts of power — above 50MW — was regarded as “a key customer” and such a customer would have to approach the power parastatal, Eskom, directly.
He said the media had referred to another company which wished to build a second smelter — the company, however, had not approached Eskom.
“In any event, the prospect of two aluminium smelters being brought on stream … is not possible in the current environment … anywhere in the world.”
This was apparently a reference to Sual, which recently said early-stage investigations showed that there was not enough power in South Africa to expand the Mozambique-based Mozal smelter and the Hillside plant in KwaZulu-Natal.
Erwin referred on Tuesday only to ongoing expansion projects in Mozambique, including Mozal. But he said the notion that there had been “some rush away” from investments in energy projects was the wrong impression. — I-Net Bridge