EDITORIAL | State mustn’t just shrug at load-shedding. It must act

SA’s state-owned power supplier Eskom on Monday announced another week of rolling blackouts. Already SA was preparing for stage 2 scheduled power cuts but Eskom ramped it up to stage 4. The dead hours kicked in at 1pm on Monday and are to continue until 5am on Friday. Eskom is removing at least 4,000 megawatts (MW) from the national grid, about 10% of its total generating capacity. Its vague excuse this time? “It was anticipated that an additional seven units would have returned to service by Monday, and this has not materialised.” Its communication of what the problem is and how it will be resolved leaves much to be desired.

Eskom’s fleet is close to kaput and it has a domino effect on the entire country.

The power utility operates 15 coal-fired power stations and has total nominal capacity of about 46,000MW of power generation. According to Bloomberg, the total breakdowns amounted to 14,874MW and another 5,579MW were off grid due to planned maintenance. These numbers tell a story of a decay and despair. Because directly linked to all the numbers on lost megawatts are our growth stats, or lack thereof. Economist Mike Schussler has said one hour of scheduled power cuts — or load-shedding as Eskom calls it — costs the economy millions. Back in 2019, Dawie Roodt estimated our economy would have been at least 10% larger had it not been for power cuts. It is defeatist to talk about economic recovery, as President Cyril Ramaphosa often refers to the economic reconstruction and recovery plan, when Eskom causes perpetual damage on businesses and individuals. 

Our electricity shortages should be regarded as a national state of emergency, yet many of our leaders’ go-to reaction seems to be a shrug of shoulders and a shaking of heads.

This latest round of blackouts also comes as the matric class of 2021 — which has been subjected to the worst of the pandemic disruptions in the past two years, with constant fluctuation between online and in-person learning and lost teaching time — write arguably their most challenging papers, maths paper 2 and physical science paper 1. This is outrageously unfair to almost a million government and independent matric school pupils who are already feeling pressure. Now schools will have to scramble to make provisions for the pupils from non-existent budgets, while the powers that be play Russian roulette over which stakeholder is more deserving of having the power on. 

Our electricity shortages should be regarded as a national state of emergency, yet many of our leaders’ go-to reaction seems to be a shrug of shoulders and a shaking of heads.

Ramaphosa’s government’s move to bring independent power producers into the picture is applaudable but does not offer any short-term solutions. Thomas Garner, chairperson of the SA Independent Power Producers Association, has said it will take at least two years to get started, mainly because of “bureaucracy, red tape, legal challenges”. In the long-term, however, all is not lost. Asked if he could envisage a future in which SA is able to meet its electricity demands to sustain lives, business and economy, from renewable resources, Garner replied in a recent interview on Cape Talk: “Absolutely.” What is holding it back, he said, is “government policy and incumbents in the coal industry”.

“We just need to get our red tape out of the way and start building.”

This is the advice our government needs to take forward. We can continue looking back, making noises of disapproval about how Eskom’s power stations have not been maintained, how money was wasted on incompetent and corrupt contractors and how Eskom was bled dry by unscrupulous thieves. We shouldn’t. Our leaders should listen to the experts now and take their advice seriously on how to speed up the arrival of a solution to turn the situation around. If South Africans knew and believed there was a 100% commitment from the government to make it work, two years would not feel that long any more.