ANDILE KHUMALO: What's not to like about independent power production?
After a failed attempt to halt the signing of 27 independent power producer contracts by new Energy Minister Jeff Radebe, the National Union of Mineworkers is now threatening to pull its support for the governing party because, it says, renewable energy is a bad idea for South Africa. "Workers of this country will not continue to vote and support an organisation which is taking away jobs from the poor. We cannot perpetually campaign and vote for the so-called New Dawn as narrated by Cyril Ramaphosa," the NUM said in a statement this week. I have tried to understand the position of the NUM on this one, and I have failed. If anything, its argument that clean power will kill jobs and create ghost towns is akin to the dispute between metered taxi drivers and Uber - it's a losing battle against the new normal. The Eskom model is that of a vertically integrated utility that is inherently a monopoly because of the capital-intensive nature of large power-generation technologies. The high le...
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