Eskom| What it will take for South Africa’s ailing power utility to keep going

DAVID RICHARD WALWYN|

THE chief operating officer (COO) of South Africa’s electricity utility, Eskom, warned in May that the government should urgently start building new generating capacity.

He was referring to a new build programme which has existed for at least a decade.

The country’s Integrated Resource Plan of 2019, a cabinet approved document, sets out the timelines for decommissioning coal-fired power stations and adding 44GW of new capacity, including 18GW of wind energy and 8GW of solar (photovoltaic).

The country is already way behind on this programme, limping along with antique power stations and regular power cuts. Outages are a regular ocurrence which are estimated to cost the country’s economy about US$1 million an hour.

South Africans are all too aware that there is an energy crisis. But in my work on energy systems and transitions, I began to ask questions about the real nature and extent of it,