By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Minister in the presidency of Electricity, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has denied that government is sidelining other BRICS member countries following the signing of several trade agreements that will see the reduction of the loadshedding crisis in the country over the next few months.
Ramokgopa said, South Africa is also engaging with other states, the main goal by President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration is to ensure that the country moves with speed in resolving energy crisis.
He also revealed that the country has received donations in the form over 480 units that are en-route to SA from China.
The donation, he said, does not mean that SA is financially obligated to pay off but that this is merely China’s way of assisting a fellow BRICS partner.
The products on the way to South Africa are estimated to be worth R167 billion.
Ramokgopa explained that the Chinese entities have valuable experience and technology that can assist Eskom and by extension, the country.
The Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) was entered into by Ramokgopa on behalf of the South African government and Chinese entities:
- State Grid Corporation of China
- China-Africa Development Fund
- China Energy International Group
- China General Nuclear Power Corporation
- China National Electric Engineering Company, Ltd
- Huawei Technologies Co Ltd
- TBEA CO., LTD.
- Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organisation
“They have experienced a similar problem that we are experiencing now. Second, they’ve got the biggest coal generation capacity of any country in the world. They’ve got the biggest installed renewable energy capacity of any country in the world…about 688GW.
“The amount of renewables they have is twelve times the size of Eskom. They are sitting on extensive amounts of liquidity. We can tap into that financing which is concessional and cheaper than any other. They [also] have the biggest installed capacity of nuclear of any country in the world.
“Even before today, almost all of them have been helping us on the generation side and have already generated a number of reports on how best we can improve the issues of performance of the coal fired powered stations and also reduce the emissions levels, on how to reduce the technical losses on the grid and also on the transmission side and what is required in relation to planning and accommodating new renewables on the grid,” he said.
Turning to questions on whether this agreement will remove load shedding, the Minister remained coy.
“When I came into office, the President [Cyril Ramaphosa] said we are short of 6000MW. Since March when we were appointed, we have added 4000MW. At Tutuka there’s a potential…there’s three units that must come on stream, they’ll give us 1680MW. We are going to fire one unit at Kusile in October, 800MW. We are going to fire three units…we are getting 2400MW. That…gives you 8940MW or so.
“But we have not resolved load shedding. The first phase is to make sure that what we are going through is eliminated and I am telling you, we are going to get those megawatts. We must build sufficient capacity to allow the economy of the country to grow at the desired rate and the rate of growth of new generation capacity must surpass the rate of economic growth,” he said.
The latest Power Availability Statistics (PAS) compiled by independent energy analyst Pieter Jordaan shows that at the end of week 33 of the year (ending 18 August 2023), South Africa has experienced a combined total of 1,296 blackout hours – equivalent to 54 full days of no power.
For context on just how bad that is, between 2014 and 2022, the country experienced the equivalent of 53 days of blackout hours combined, making 2023 worse than the last decade for load shedding.
While South Africans typically track total load shedding hours to gauge the severity of the outages, the fact that the country has been in a near-permanent state of load shedding since September 2022 makes it difficult to tell how bad things are.
This is because load shedding stages vary greatly. A full day of stage 1 load shedding and a full day of stage 6 load shedding will show the same total hours of load shedding (24 hours), even though the latter is significantly worse.
Watch Live in the video below:
Video Courtesy of SABC.