Page 5 - AfrElec Week 01

AfrElec COMMENTARY AfrElec
from accusations of sabotage, even from Rama- phosa himself, to Eskom’s preferred concept of a perfect storm.
Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer blamed a com- bination of high rainfall and technical issues at coal-fired thermal power plants (TPPs) in December.
Reform plans
Meanwhile, Eskom’s woes are far wider than the current emergency loadshedding crisis. It has ZAR454bn ($31bn) of debt, the government has plans on the table to split up the company and it is a major polluter that, along with other industrial giants, is preventing the country from cutting its overall emissions.
Meanwhile, it relies on annual government cash injections to stay in business.
Eskom is set to receive ZAR100bn ($6.7bn) from the government over the next two years to meet operational expenses, as well as well as a ZAR230bn ($15.7bn) injection spread over the next decade.
The company this week has asked the gov- ernment to exempt it from new emissions reg- ulations in order to avoid spending an estimated by ZAR37bn ($2.6bn) by 2035 on new pollution control technology.
Meanwhile, Eskom has asked the government
for ZAR1.8bn ($126mn) to fund bonus pay- ments for staff at all levels. The government insists that these are not performance-related, but the public has reacted with ridicule to the bonuses given the power cuts and deep prob- lems within the company. Finally, President Ramaphosa said on January 9 that no significant improvement to the loadshedding issues were in sight, stressing that Eskom needed to address serious maintenance issues.
“The loadshedding that keeps coming is because of the maintenance challenges. Those are known problems and we are addressing them. In the end, we will need to be maintaining those power stations so that we repair them and put them on a better footing,” he said.
New CEO de Ruyter begins work next week, earlier than planned. Neither the government nor Eskom have published details of how they will implement the government’s October roadmap to break up Eskom and to end its gen- erating monopoly.
All of Eskom’s statements this week have stressed that its systems “remain vulnerable.”
With no hope in sight of any changes, and the threat of loadshedding always hanging over Eskom, South Africa’s consumers and the econ- omy at large, it seems that the whole country is set to remain vulnerable™
Eskom’s woes are far wider than the current emergency loadshedding crisis
Week 01 09•January•2020 w w w. N E W S B A S E . c o m
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