Eskom group CEO Andre De Ruyter said the struggling power utility was making progress in addressing vandalism and criminality at power stations that impeded electricity generation.
De Ruyter was speaking at the Investing in African Mining Indaba on Tuesday. His appearance at the event comes weeks before he leaves the CEO position in March after resigning late last year.
After his resignation, news emerged of an alleged attempt to poison him. He recently told parliament that the Tutuka power station was grappling with crime and theft as management walked around with guards and bulletproof vests.
He said due to criminality and other challenges, the energy availability factor at the plant was as low as 17%.
Speaking to Minerals Council South Africa CEO Roger Baxter, he said two silver linings in South Africa’s bleak energy outlook were the private sector’s commitment to assisting Eskom with capacity and recent crackdowns on criminality at power stations.
“We have shut down three illegal coal blending sites. I understand there are 30 more being targeted,” said De Ruyter.
De Ruyter lamented the impact of continued load-shedding on the economy and investor appetite but praised mining companies for involving themselves in the government’s latest embedded energy drive.
“The electricity crisis we are experiencing at the moment is a constraint to investment. That is very clear and that is why we need to resolve it immediately. The minerals sector deserves credit for committing to support us. It enables us to weather some of our unreliability in a better way than we would have,” he said.
De Ruyter told Mining Indaba delegates that up to 4GW were not available due to events such as three units going down at Kusile and one unit at Koeberg remaining down.
“The outlook for 2023 is going to be a tough one. 2023 is going to be difficult, but when you look at the pipeline and projects like Seriti, which will eventually install 900MW of wind and solar right in the heart of Mpumalanga, a company like Anglo converting their trucks to hydrogen. Increasingly, we are attracting more private sector investment into the grid.”
He also hailed 9,000MW of new capacity, which he said was either being built or financed, adding that from the calendar year 2024 onwards, South Africa should start seeing a reduction in load-shedding. But he said that was only the beginning of beefing up the grid.
“I think the important thing to point out is that we should not stop there. We have to double down and accelerate capacity. And this is where the president’s structural reforms have not got the credit that they should for liberalising generation, which a lot of members have taken advantage of,” he said.
Earlier on Tuesday morning, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the SA Police Service’s economic infrastructure task teams were working in 20 identified hotspots, conducting “hundreds of operations and made a significant number of arrests” in the past six months.
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