Turkey's Karpowership looks to plug South African power gap

Turkey’s Karpowership, one of the world’s largest powership firms, has submitted a plan to South Africa to provide “several” ships capable of plugging a severe power shortage in the country, a senior company official said on Tuesday.

South Africa’s state-owned power utility Eskom has regularly cut power over the past year, hobbling economic growth in Africa’s most industrialised country as unreliable coal-fired plants struggle to generate enough electricity to meet demand.

In December, South Africa’s energy department issued a request for information (RFI) to source between 2,000 and 3,000 megawatts (MW) of power generation capacity that could be connected in the shortest time, at the least cost.

“We have made a submission to the department as of last Friday and they received information on what is possible, where and how we would look to do it,” said Patrick O’Driscoll, global sales director at Karpowership.

“We have identified several locations that we believe are potential injection points,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of an African mining conference.