Power cuts should ease over coming days and the nation’s electricity supply will continue to improve over the medium term as new investments bolster generation, according to public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan.
“We will have load-shedding for a while in SA,” Gordhan said on Thursday in an interview on Bloomberg TV. But “not of the order we’ve seen in the recent past”.
SA should have built additional capacity almost two decades ago and now needs “massive investment” in energy infrastructure, according to Gordhan, who oversees Eskom.
He expects a government initiative to buy more power from private producers of renewable energy to stabilise the energy supply over the longer term, and said there remains a “huge appetite” to invest despite delays to the programme.
Other initiatives have been taken to turn Eskom’s performance around, including rehiring experienced staff who worked there and increasing its maintenance budget. The utility had numerous CEOs until Andre de Ruyter took over the position in January 2020.
Eskom’s management has “done the best they can”, Gordhan said.
“I think we’ve got to keep under constant review whether the governance and the management capability is of the order which would help us to meet the current crisis.”
Gordhan said there was “no risk whatsoever” of a prolonged outage.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
Load-shedding set to ease soon, no risk of total grid collapse: Gordhan
Image: Bloomberg
Power cuts should ease over coming days and the nation’s electricity supply will continue to improve over the medium term as new investments bolster generation, according to public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan.
“We will have load-shedding for a while in SA,” Gordhan said on Thursday in an interview on Bloomberg TV. But “not of the order we’ve seen in the recent past”.
SA should have built additional capacity almost two decades ago and now needs “massive investment” in energy infrastructure, according to Gordhan, who oversees Eskom.
He expects a government initiative to buy more power from private producers of renewable energy to stabilise the energy supply over the longer term, and said there remains a “huge appetite” to invest despite delays to the programme.
Other initiatives have been taken to turn Eskom’s performance around, including rehiring experienced staff who worked there and increasing its maintenance budget. The utility had numerous CEOs until Andre de Ruyter took over the position in January 2020.
Eskom’s management has “done the best they can”, Gordhan said.
“I think we’ve got to keep under constant review whether the governance and the management capability is of the order which would help us to meet the current crisis.”
Gordhan said there was “no risk whatsoever” of a prolonged outage.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
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