South Africa's president Cyril Ramaphosa has emphasized the importance of the country investing in an energy mix as Eskom implements Stage 3 and 4 of rolling blackouts following several weeks of stage 6 loadshedding which ravaged the country.
He reiterated the country’s future energy plan, saying experts are working on a hybrid energy generation system including gas, coal, nuclear, wind and solar.
”Because we are committed to a mixed energy approach, we are going to be looking and exploiting the natural endowments that our country has, which are much cheaper, the sun and wind as well. All that will come into the mix as we proceed forward. That is the way many other countries are going. We are saying we are going to look at renewables, which has a lot of great opportunity and new industries being opened.”
Fixing Eskom’s aging fleet and bringing new renewable energy projects online won’t fix load shedding overnight. South Africa’s National Energy Crisis Committee, a body run out of Ramaphosa’s office, has proposed several measures to ease the crisis in the short term, including importing energy from neighboring countries and buying excess energy from private producers.
Emergency legislation is also being developed to allow the faster approval and development of power plants. Many of these measures had been proposed in the past but would not happen quickly or were not viable. For example, several of South Africa’s neighbors, including Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana, either don’t have excess electricity or are dealing with loadshedding problems of their own. South Africa already imports energy from Mozambique who are proposing to add another Powership to their grid bring the total number to two.
Speaking on the sidelines of the WEF in Davos, South Africa’s finance minister Enoch Godongwana told Reuters that loadshedding would be “a thing of the past” in the next 12 to 18 months.
South Africa’s controversial dealings with Turkey’s Karpowership continue as new reports indicate that the government has made fresh inquiries into securing electricity from the floating power provider.
A decision is expected to be made by the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment on the 1 220MW deal with Karpowership by 7th March 2023.
Karpowership says it is ready to “ease the heavy burden of South Africa’s energy crisis.” It would do this by docking several ships off the country’s coast and connecting onboard gas-fired power stations to the energy grid via enormous cables.
Environmental groups are concerned that the off-shore power stations would contribute to the country’s carbon emissions and more importantly would negatively impact marine ecology which could endanger the livelihood of local fishing communities. Some have said that the 20-year contract for its South African operations is too long.
In the past, the company has supplied power to African countries like Ghana, Mozambique, Senegal and Gambia. Across the Atlantic, it has sold electricity to Cuba and Brazil.
For Karpowership, South Africa will have to weigh up the cost of perceived environmental damages with the cost that loadshedding is wreaking on the country’s economy, and the cost it will pay the Turkish company for its generation capacity. Is it all worth it so loadshedding can be reduced by a single stage? .
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