After continuous failings, Ramokgopa makes a new promise on ending loadshedding
12 October 2023
The Minister of Electricity, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, appears not to have learnt his lesson from the many failed promises repeatedly claiming that South Africa had turned the corner and was on course to end loadshedding. With the ongoing lower levels of loadshedding that we have experienced lately, Ramakgopa has once again made an optimistic claim that the ANC government is resolving the loadshedding crisis “in the next year”.
The reality is that we are nowhere near ending loadshedding in South Africa, unless we do more to address increasing our generation capacity, expanding our transmission network and collecting revenue at the point of distribution.
Dr Ramokgopa has placed much of his hopes for resolving of loadshedding on Kusile. And, while the return to service of units 1 to 4, and the commissioning of unit 5 will have a positive impact on the Energy Availability Factor, this is only one of a myriad generating facilities that feed into our energy grid. In addition, the repairs to units 1, 2 and 3 are temporary and at some point, these units will have to be taken off line again in order to effect the permanent repairs. The “energy cost” of this is around 2400 MW.
In the meantime, Eskom are working around the clock to try and catch up on long overdue maintenance on its system in order to address the maintenance backlog which is further complicating the generation of electricity as unplanned breakdowns continue to create havoc with loadshedding stages.