Eskom's chief executive officer, Brian Molefe. File picture: Timothy Bernard Eskom's chief executive officer, Brian Molefe. File picture: Timothy Bernard
Johannesburg - "We dare the South African economy to grow as much as it wants and we will make the power available; Eskom is not a threat to growth anymore.”
This was the bold declaration by chief executive Brian Molefe, who on Tuesday assured the public that load shedding was now likely to be a thing of the past.
For a company that was struggling to keep the lights on just over a year ago, the utility made some lofty promises on Tuesday.
By mid-April last year, Eskom reportedly had to implement load shedding 26 times since the beginning of January as it battled to keep up with the increasing demand for electricity.
But at the Eskom State of the System briefing in Sandton on Tuesday, Molefe and his executive team told the media that after 11 months without load shedding, there was no chance of it happening again until March next year, at the very least.
In fact, according to Eskom executives, the company was so confident about its generation capacity that it was planning to sell excess power. “The improved performance is not due to lower demand,” said Molefe, explaining that there had been increased demand during winter this year. He said the current peak demand for electricity in winter was about 35 000 megawatts (MW).
From this year, after new units at Medupi and Ingula power stations came online, Eskom had far exceeded that figure and estimated that by 2022, the demand would increase only by a further 5 000MW.
However, by that point, the utility estimated that it would be generating about 53 000MW, which meant a large electricity excess.
Chief financial officer Anoj Singh confirmed the plan to sell off the excess. He said Eskom planned to grow its share of export sales after it had already increased that by 12 percent in the past year.
Group executive for generation Matshela Koko gave the assurance that there would be no issues with coal supply at the power stations over the next five years, but negotiations with outside providers were continuing in order to maintain the supply after that time period.
Molefe said the current power supply issues, including multiple power outages across hotspot areas such as Soweto, Kagiso on the West Rand, Katlehong in Ekurhuleni, Mamelodi in Tshwane and Bophelong in the Vaal, were no longer linked to electricity generation, but rather distribution.
He acknowledged the distribution problems brought about by poor maintenance at sub-stations, cable theft and an overabundance of illegal connections were the next hurdle for the utility to deal with.
However, he said each substation and transformer that had been damaged or deteriorated would be replaced, adding that even with the planned maintenance next year, there was no chance that Eskom would hit its electricity generation capacity.
Meanwhile, Minister of Public Enterprises Lynne Brown on Tuesday expressed confidence that great strides had been made with regard to load shedding.
In a speech at the Power-Gen Africa conference, Brown congratulated the utility for its work and thanked its executives for taking the country out of the “dark hole of load shedding”.she said was caused by “no investment by the Apartheid Government and sluggish investment during our earlier years of constitutional governance”.