The launch of a one-stop shop to facilitate and speed up the addition of renewable energy projects to the grid has featured prominently in this week’s energy crisis update.
In his regular Sunday briefing on the state of load-shedding in South Africa, electricity minister Kgosientsho “Sputla” Ramokgopa said project owners could now submit their plans to a single portal that falls under trade and industry minister Ebrahim Patel.
“They no longer need to approach several different departments for approval on things like environmental impact assessment, water licences, land servitude and all the other issues related to providing power to the grid.
“It’s a way of ensuring the acceleration of new generation capacity to the grid,” Ramokgopa said, explaining that energy transmission was to be the focus of his report-back for the week.
He said transmission capacity was being addressed on multiple fronts because “we can’t just kick the can down the road”, he said, explaining the addition of renewables would make for a mix of energy sources, but create a need for more capacity within the grid to handle it.
Because of our lack of transmission capacity, we need to add another 14,000km in the next 10 years. Lots of work as well as money is needed.
— Kgosientsho Ramokgopa
“At the moment we have 33,217km of high voltage power lines, which we need to extend to take on renewables.
“Because of our lack of transmission capacity, we need to add another 14,000km in the next 10 years, which equates to 2,700km per year. Historically we have only been managing 800km a year, so lots of work as well as money is needed,” Ramokgopa said, adding that Eskom was working with the market to reconfigure the grid.
Saul Musker from the presidency project management unit said the National Transmission Company (NTC) — created in 2021 — had yet to have all three licensing applications approved by the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa).
He said the NTC was the crucial first step in the unbundling of Eskom that would see the “creation of a level playing field for the market”.
“It has applied for a transmission licence, a trading licence and an import/export licence to operate properly,” Musker said, adding that while Nersa had only approved the transmission licence, no approval had yet come through on the other two.
“We are concerned because Nersa has not given a time frame on this, and we are hoping to speed up and stop any delays in establishing this entity,” he said, explaining that an independent board had been appointed and tenders were in place.
Speaking on the events that transpired across the grid between July 24 and 28, Ramokgopa said the average generation capacity had been 28,310MW, with demand peaking at 29,376MW on Wednesday, which had to be managed through load-shedding.
“Unplanned capacity loss through units failing continued to be our albatross this week,” he said, giving boiler tube leaks as the reason for most of these failures.
Ramokgopa said the current cold snap was a concern, because Eskom was expecting a surge in demand as people struggle to stay warm.
“The only corrective measure we have against this is load-shedding,” he said, warning that increased demand could lead to the implementation of deeper stages of load-shedding which they were hoping to avert.
Ramokgopa said he had visited the Grootvlei power station last Sunday after a fire there that had taken down one of its generating units. He said he was pleased with what he saw — that the fire which had been caused when an accidental fuel spillage caught fire — had been extinguished immediately and there had been no injuries or fatalities.
The impact, he said, amounted to a need for between 8-18km of wiring to be replaced, with the repaired unit expected to be up and running again by the end of next week.
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