The Black Business Council (BBC) has asked the 55th national conference of the ANC, starting on Friday, to deal with load-shedding to save the economy and jobs.
The council said the country was approaching a historic two months of uninterrupted daily blackouts and this is unacceptable.
“These blackouts continue to erode the confidence of business and investors in South Africa and the economic reconstruction and recovery plan won’t be achieved.”
The council said on July 25, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced measures to address the electricity crisis and the BBC supported those actions aimed at improving the performance of Eskom's fleet of coal-fired power stations.
“Five months down the line, things have got worse instead of improving and this can only be attributed to the incompetent management which is promoting wind and solar energy instead of fixing Eskom.
“The BBC believes the dramatic decline in the reliability of the Eskom power system, which in the past three years has plunged the country into the worst energy crisis, must not be allowed to continue.”
Black Business Council urges ANC conference to tackle Eskom blackouts
Image: Maribe Trevor Mokgobu
The Black Business Council (BBC) has asked the 55th national conference of the ANC, starting on Friday, to deal with load-shedding to save the economy and jobs.
The council said the country was approaching a historic two months of uninterrupted daily blackouts and this is unacceptable.
“These blackouts continue to erode the confidence of business and investors in South Africa and the economic reconstruction and recovery plan won’t be achieved.”
The council said on July 25, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced measures to address the electricity crisis and the BBC supported those actions aimed at improving the performance of Eskom's fleet of coal-fired power stations.
“Five months down the line, things have got worse instead of improving and this can only be attributed to the incompetent management which is promoting wind and solar energy instead of fixing Eskom.
“The BBC believes the dramatic decline in the reliability of the Eskom power system, which in the past three years has plunged the country into the worst energy crisis, must not be allowed to continue.”
As City Power handles 4,000 outages, Joburg asks for three days’ exemption from load-shedding
The council said Eskom has installed electricity capacity of 45,000MW and the demand for electricity was about 32,000MW, meaning there was 13,000MW capacity not being used.
“All efforts should be made to make this capacity available as this is the only solution to stop blackouts.”
While the council supported diversification of the energy mix to add greener technologies, it did not believe more wind and solar energy would end blackouts. This was “supported by science as evidenced by Europe recommissioning coal power stations despite the fact they had plenty of wind and solar energy”.
“The BBC has, on numerous occasions, raised the incapacity and incompetence of the Eskom CEO and COO and would like to plead with the governing party to instruct the board of Eskom to remove them.”
The council said it was confident the ANC conference does not want to be remembered as the party that collapsed the economy due to unprecedented blackouts.
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