Rude awakening for South Africa – Electricity Rolling Blackouts are back

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The return of load shedding this past week should serve as a stark reminder to South Africa that the power crisis in the country is far from over, and the grid is walking on a knife’s edge.

Eskom issued a warning last Friday (31 January) that load shedding could make a swift return. This quickly became a reality when, just hours later, stage 3 load shedding was implemented.

While the load shedding was relatively brief—starting Friday evening and ending by Sunday morning— the Bureau for Economic Research (BER) said that this highlighted that “electricity supply conditions remain very tight”.

Analysing the hourly demand and supply figures, the group said that there was a clear deterioration in available capacity from 27 January.

“Demand, however, remained strong, and on 31 January, capacity went into deficit,” it said.

Eskom described the situation as a “perfect storm” of incidents, where a combination of maintenance delays, technical failures, and the using up of emergency reserves all led to the outages.

The rude awakening for South Africans at large, though, is that the situation deteriorated quite quickly, and that this could easily happen again.

Another rude awakening for the country is that, even with no load shedding or its sporadic return, the electricity grid is still constraining economic growth.

There is simply no room for the economy to grow while Eskom walks this fine line.

“The lack of a stable, predictable supply of electricity remains a significant brake on economic growth. If growth were to accelerate rapidly, the risk of another round of load-shedding would rise,” the BER said.

“(South Africa) needs to press ahead with the electricity system reform programme. Already, reforms to create independent power producers have added over 6GW of electricity generation capacity. The unbundling of Eskom will lead to a more competitive generation market, bringing new capacity online.”

Ramaphosa on board
President Cyril Ramaphosa paid particular attention to energy reform in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) on Thursday (6 February).

Echoing the sentiments of the BER, the president said that while the measures implemented through the Energy Action Plan have reduced the severity and frequency of load shedding, the return of outages this past week served as a reminder that supply is still constrained.

“We now need to put the risk of load shedding behind us once and for all by completing the reform of our energy system to ensure long-term energy security,” he said.

Ramaphosa noted that the Electricity Regulation Amendment Act, which came into effect on 1 January, “marks the beginning of a new era and will put in place the building blocks of a competitive electricity market.

“Over time, this will allow multiple electricity generation entities to emerge and compete,” he said.

The president also announced that the state will pump around R940 billion into infrastructure projects over the next three years, which includes the electricity sector.

“We will mobilise private sector investment in our transmission network to connect more renewable energy to the grid.”

The government will also focus on state companies critical to the operation of key sectors with R375 billion going towards these enterprises.

“Over the coming year, we will initiate a second wave of reform to unleash more rapid and inclusive growth.

“Our immediate focus is to enable Eskom, Transnet and other state-owned enterprises that are vital to our economy to function optimally,” he said.

Source: https://businesstech.co.za/news/finance/810757/rude-awakening-for-south-africa-2/