South Africa to ‘open floodgates’ for private power generation

SOUTH Africa plans to try and resolve its chronic power shortage by making it easier for private companies to build plants and paying households and businesses to produce electricity from solar panels.

The urgent need to fix the country’s 14-year electricity crisis has been laid bare by five weeks of power outages that ended last week, the worst since the near-collapse of the grid in 2008. President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ruling African National Congress have been heavily criticized over their inability to resolve the problem, despite repeated promises to do so.

“We need to “open the floodgates for private investment in new generation capacity,” the presidency said in a presentation to opposition parties on Monday that has been seen by Bloomberg.

“Our overriding priority is to add as much new capacity to the grid as possible, as quickly as possible.”

With South Africa’s national power utility, Eskom Holdings, saddled with R396-billion of debt and unable to meet demand from its fleet of aging