Johnathan Paoli
Electricity Minister in the Presidency, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, has praised Eskom’s performance and said the improvement in power production was the result of intended, deliberate action and engineering at work at the power utility.
Ramokgopa was briefing the media on the state of the Energy Action Plan on Monday. He said that the recent boost in performance of Eskom’s grid can be attributed to a conflux of factors and thanked everyone involved in turning the crisis around, saying while they were not out of the woods yet, they have been making strides.
“Essentially we have undermined the rate and frequency of failure of these units, in terms of their reliability, and secondly we have improved on the efficiency in order to improve production closer to their design capacity,” Ramokgopa said.
The minister said that the trendline, a comparative trajectory in relation to performance during the month of May earlier this year (27410 MW), indicated a generation of 28 268 MW for the week of the 2 to 6 October, thus an addition of 800MW to the power grid.
The average for the subsequent week indicated a generation of 29 062MW, with 2 9418MW for the week after that, with expectations of breaching 30 000MW by the end of the month.
“We have seen, consistently now, we are sitting on a 60/61% available capacity,” Ramokgopa said.
In addition, the minister said the rapid adoption of rooftop solar among residents in the country has contributed to a significant drop in demand, with installed rooftop solar now estimated at about 4 500MW, almost doubling from June last year.
Ramokgopa added that the department is also pushing for a new financing instrument to be introduced that will allow poorer households to also take advantage of the boom, and said that an “unintended consequence” of the current incentive is that only middle to high-income households could take part, creating an imbalance.
Any additional or extended incentives will work together with the coming feed-in tariffs, which would further incentivise the uptake of solar as excess generation will then become an income earner, he said.
However, Ramokgopa has warned, despite this sustained maintenance and the improved power production, the energy generated would still remain insufficient to save the country from a crisis without new forms and areas of power generation becoming the focus again of further development.
The minister has previously ‘lamented’ the time it took for the government to go from issuing requests for proposals (RFPs) to announcing preferred bidder status and reaching financial close when it comes to renewable-energy power projects.
Ramokgopa’s comments came as the seventh round (Bid Window 7) of the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP) remains in limbo, having been delayed since early last year.
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