South Africa’s electricity crisis continues to be a headache for many and it appears that for most of the remainder of this year, load shedding will continue to be a permanent feature, an energy expert warned on Saturday.
Speaking to The Citizen Mark Swilling said when the country reached stage 4 load shedding, South Africa was losing around R1 billion a day in lost revenue, stressing that rolling blackouts will continue to get worse.
“There is very little chance that it is going to get better in the next two years. It might get worse over the next two years and the reason for this is that it’s got nothing to do with the weather but it has everything to do with that fact that we have a fleet of very old power stations, and only two of them are relatively new and either of the two are performing as they should.
“A relatively new power station like Thuthuka is operating at 30% which is shocking. It should be at 75% and that’s the most corrupt power station and most inefficient,” said Swilling.
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The power station in question has been in the news for all the wrong reasons.
He stressed that as old as they are, it was impossible to shut down the old power stations until new generation capacity was built.
“The only new generating capacity we can build quickly is renewables. We can build renewables on time [and] on budget within two years.
“On a scale, what we need is five gigawatts per annum going forward for at least the next 20 years and if [former Eskom CEO Matshela] Koko and [Brian] Molefe had not sabotaged the power stations and not sabotaged the renewables programme – we would have built five gigawatts between 2015 and now, which they prevented. And if we would have built five gigawatts, we wouldn’t have had load shedding,” he said.
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Swilling described the power crisis as ‘very serious’, saying the worst possible crisis is a collapse of the national grid, which he believes the country is not close to reaching that stage.
“However, we are in a sense the next worst to that… and that’s something to be very worried about.
“The electricity availability factor over the last years has dropped from around 75% to just 50% and as far as Eskom is concerned, the best that can happen is to maintain that level. But, if you look at the projections that Eskom has published for their electricity availability factor through to the end of the year, it’s not looking good,” Swilling added.
Eskom’s maintenance programme
Another energy expert Ted Blom said the budget cuts to Eskom’s maintenance programme had exacerbated the power crisis.
“Eskom doesn’t even have spare parts available in most of the power stations and according to the information I have received, even management at these power stations is simply out of its depth,” Blom added.
Meanwhile, Eskom on Saturday ramped up load shedding to stage 4 which is expected to last until Monday at 5am.
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