Eskom holding back economic growth and job creation

The latest round of rolling blackouts, which went into effect yesterday after the collapse of a coal silo at Eskom's Majuba power station in Mpumalanga, is further evidence of how critical South Africa's power constraints are.

The Majuba debacle took a sizeable 1800MW of electricity off the grid - Eskom's total capacity is usually about 43 000MW - forcing major metros such as Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth into rotational load-shedding.

It is worrying that electricity cuts of this scale occur on a Sunday, when power usage is considerably lower than during the week, and it now seems almost certain that they will continue, and perhaps intensify, for most of this week.

Energy experts have said that we might be hit by power outages on a scale last experienced in 2008.

Although the Majuba incident was catastrophic, the country's electricity supply has been under pressure for much of this year, and households and businesses have had to contend with repeated bouts of official load-shedding and too many unofficial blackouts.

The national grid was already buckling last week, with Eskom warning that its generation capacity had been reduced by about a quarter, mostly as a result of unplanned outages.

Because many of our power stations are long in the tooth but are being forced to run at full capacity to meet demand, power cuts to allow for maintenance, and unplanned outages, are likely to be increasingly common

With the deadline for the coming on line of the 4800MW Medupi power station becoming something of a moving target - it now seems that the first of its six generators will be plugged into the national grid by April next year, followed by the others at nine-month intervals - load-shedding is likely to be part of our national life until at least 2019.

The tragedy is that, with such power constraints, our economic-growth target of 5% a year - essential for the creation of significant numbers of jobs and reduction of inequality - is unlikely to be achieved.