DA challenges ANC to put narrow politics aside and adopt our Cheaper Electricity Bill
21 January 2020
In the light of the ANC’s lekgotla where it was decided that “evidence-based decision making” will henceforth govern its approach to SOEs, the Democratic Alliance (DA) challenges the ANC to put their money where their mouth is and adopt our Cheaper Electricity Bill in Parliament.
Our Cheaper Energy Bill provides a legislative framework to lower the cost of electricity and boost the reliability of supply. It seeks to split Eskom into two entities – a generation entity and a transmission/distribution entity.
At the core of the DA’s plan is the creation of a privatised generation entity that would break Eskom’s monopoly on the production of energy enabling and ensuring that it competes on an equal footing with Independent Power Producers (IPPs).
In the last ten years, Eskom is reported to have paid R47.4bn for diesel just to keep the lights on. It is said that, in a desperate attempt to keep the lights on, the embattled power utility rapidly increased its usage of its pumped storage and diesel generators, which resulted in it exceeding its budget for diesel by almost 50%.