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 for their inability to resolve the problem, despite repeated promises to do so.
With South Africa’s national power utility, Eskom, saddled with R396 billion of debt and unable to meet demand from its fleet of ageing and poorly maintained coal-fired plants, the country is turning toward renewables and the private sector for power provision. That’s met an ideological backlash from powerful interests within the ANC that want greater state control of the industry.
The presidency’s plans would add 7,165 megawatts of capacity within three months, a further 5,663 megawatts in a year and 9,770 megawatts in 18 months, meaning that the amount of available generation capacity could almost double. The need for investment in transmission and distribution infrastructure and “credible, confidence-boosting measures” is also part of the plan, to “assure South Africans that significant actions are being taken to address the crisis.
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