Page 10 - AfrElec Week 09

AfrElec
NEWS IN BRIEF
AfrElec
ESKOM
Union leader calls on Eskom to switch off lights
EFF leader Julius Malema has called on Eskom to switch the lights off at government departments and municipalities which owe the utility money.
Speaking at Megawatt Park before he handed over a memorandum of demands
to Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter, Malema said Eskom needed to switch off power to all municipalities and government departments which could not pay its debts.
He was speaking after the EFF marched kilometres in cold and rainy weather from Innesfree Park to Eskom’s headquarters.
In December last year, Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) heard that overdue debt owed to Eskom by municipalities increased by some R1.2bn in September to R26.4bn by the end of October.
n the same meeting, Cogta’s Kevin Naidoo told Scopa the top 20 payment levels had dropped from a peak of 91% in March 2016 to 31.3% in October 2019, with virtually no payment towards the current accounts over the last seven months.
“A lot of departments owe Eskom; start with those departments in Pretoria, close electricity, let them pay. With that money you must give indigent people free electricity,” Malema said.
Ramaphosa ‘most
interested’inpossiblesale
of Eskom power stations
President Cyril Ramaphosa says he is open
to the idea of selling some of Eskom’s power stations to private companies to run.
“I am most interested in looking at that option. It will help the local communities in those towns, it will secure jobs,” Ramaphosa said.
Ramaphosa was responding to a question about how Eskom would revitalise its business model and accrue capital outside of further bailouts.
He said he was not opposed to the sale of power stations after Eskom had been split into three units for generation, transmission and distribution. “Transmission will remain state- owned by definition, but in generation we have a number of players who can participate,” he said.
Having more power producers generating electricity and selling to Eskom would “encourage competition”, he added.
On a question regarding whether the touted bailout of Eskom by pension funds would be converted to debt or equity, Ramaphosa said this must still be determined
“Cosatu has suggested the establishment of a special purpose vehicle that would house the debt... it must still be determined if that will be an equity instrument. They want government to underwrite that,” he said.
Ramaphosa earlier said pension funds shouldn’t be “fearful” to invest in a “revitalised, restructured and revamped” Eskom.
According to Ramaphosa, the “social compact” deal for Eskom’s debt was “80% to 90% there”.
SA to wait six months for ResourcePlan
South Africa’s plans to procure more electricity-generation capacity will have to wait as long as six months until the regulator
has approved a state resource strategy, the nation’s energy department said, Bloomberg said in a report.
Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe has submitted the so-called Integrated Resource Plan to the National Energy Regulator of South Africa for its consideration.
As soon as the plan is processed by the regulator, procurement of new capacity can begin, Department of Mineral Resources and Energy Deputy Director-General Jacob Mbele said on March 03.
“It could be anywhere between three to six months,” he said when asked to estimate the timeline.
South Africa’s Independent Power Producers office has started preparing a procurement process for when the IRP is processed, according to Maduna Ngobeni, a representative of the office.
POLICY
ECG claims Illegal power
connection a threat to
Ghana’s economy
Kwame Agyeman-Budu, Managing Director of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), has warned the general public to desist from illegal power connections to their homes and places of work.
He said such practices go against the laws of the land; hence culprits will be made to face the full rigour of the law if they are caught.
Agyeman-Budu explained that illegal connections threaten the economy because the state is unable to generate the right amount of revenue from the sale of power to embark on other development projects.
“If every nation will develop it will depend on its energy supply and so we appeal to the public to desist from illegal connections,” he said on Accra FM Wednesday, March 4.
He added: “The ECG is collaborating with the Ministry of Energy and the Energy Commission to see how we can make the punishment for the culprits more punitive.
“The LI 1826 that empowers us to go after culprits and the punishment for them is not punitive enough.”
Budu-Agyeman said the country is not back to the era of erratic power supply popularly referred to in Ghana as ‘Dumsor’.
He said the current power fluctuations in some parts of the country was due to some maintenance work that was ongoing.
The situation, he pointed out, will soon be
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Week 09 05•March•2020