Eskom scrutinising emergency power contracts as cuts ongoing

SOUTH Africa’s Eskom is scrutinising contracts to buy power from a government program for private developers to quickly bring on board additional generation.

The state-owned utility started scheduled power cuts for the first time in almost a month on Monday, cutting 2 000 megawatts from the grid. That was due to breakdowns that affected a range of units, including at one of its newest stations and as heavy rains complicated pumped-storage capacity, Eskom Chief Executive Officer Andre de Ruyter said Tuesday in a briefing.

It’s had to reduce the amount of long-needed maintenance on core coal-fired stations in order to keep more capacity running.

Eskom has called for as much as 6 000 megawatts of additional generation to stabilise supply and the government has rolled out programs to add renewables and capacity that could be connected to the grid as soon as possible.

But the processes have been stalled by