Lights are out in a shop in Cape Town, South Africa due to its struggling power utility Eskom implementing regular power cuts, September 21, 2022.The South African National Energy Development Institute has criticised the move by Eskom to implement stage 6 load shedding.This week’s rolling blackouts come after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s pronouncements in his 2024 State of the Nation Address that the end of rolling blackouts was in sight.
SANEDI Energy Secretariat’s Prof. Sampson Mamphweli says, “We are looking at about a year and that is also dependent on the fixing of the coal fleet. We are sitting at about 15000 megawatts in unplanned capacity loss factor, which is basically the breakdowns, so that needs to go down drastically to about 5000 megawatts or so for us to see the end of load shedding.”
“There are other measures that will still need to come on board, there are issues around demand side management and the energy efficiency, there are geyser control programmes that still need to come on board, NECOM has done quite a lot of work around that, government still needs to bring in money to implement those kinds of programmes.