When it comes to Eskom and rolling blackouts, you have to ignore the multitude of conspiracy theories out there: Here are the FAQs and the facts.
It is heart-wrenching when you go to your neighbourhood store and find that five of the seven tills are not manned because rolling blackouts will eat up half of the Sunday workday. The four guys who usually cut and prepare flowers are not there either.
That is nine people who are probably going to get one day deducted from their salaries. Nine people who are probably fuming at the government and Eskom right now. Who knows how many times they’ve had their wages docked these past few weeks? Multiply that by X number of workers furloughed or let go due to rolling blackouts.
Those are the true costs of rolling blackouts, a sentiment echoed by President Cyril Ramaphosa in his weekly letter, From the Desk of the President, last week.
The causes and consequences of “load shedding” have been sufficiently anatomised over the past decade. I have also written quite a bit about it in this very column.
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Unfortunately, a stubborn ecosystem of disinformation and conspiracy theories has set up shop on social media (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram) and elsewhere, spreading rumours that Eskom is being sabotaged in order to award lucrative 20-year Independent Power Producer (IPP) purchase agreements to African National Congress and “white — and black — monopoly capital” cronies, with some even alleging that the IPP programme “is designed to corrode Eskom from providing its core mandate”.
Ted Blom, for example, has expressed similar sentiments on the Gareth Cliff Show Extra, SABC and other platforms.
More recently, some of these falsehoods have found their way into mainstream media and been lapped up enthusiastically by seasoned journalists. This dangerous trend must be debunked.
At the risk of sounding repetitive, I am going to try to answer the following questions in a structured way so as to bring the facts front and centre of the debate once again.
Why is there ‘load shedding’?
There are a few reasons for this. The first one is the number of connections after 1994.
The old Eskom (Electricity Supply Commission, Escom) that celebrates its 100th anniversary on 1 March 2023) — which grew its generation capacity from 4,000MW to 40,000MW between 1960 and 1990, with a workforce of about 60,000 people — really served only the interests of apartheid South Africa.
Between 1994 and 2000, Eskom connected more than 2.5 million households to the grid. It even managed to drop electricity prices by 15% while doing that, to help fulfil its transformation and developmental mandate. Quick question here: if that many people were connected to the grid only when a democratic government came to power, who actually had electricity prior to 1990?
Eskom’s drive to provide electricity was such a spectacular success that in 2001, the utility was named power company of the year at the Financial Times Global Energy Awards in New York. Now, against this backdrop, is it not surprising when you hear people talk about 30, 40 years of mismanagement?
But anyway, back to why Eskom has “load shedding”. After connecting so many new users to the grid, and factoring in demographic growth, it was clear that Eskom would need new generation capacity. Then Eskom board chair Reuel Khoza informed the government that if this new generation capacity did not materialise, the country would start witnessing “load shedding” around 2007.
A decision was also made to resurrect some really old coal-fired plants that had already been mothballed, including Komati, as “Return to Service” sites. I will circle back to Komati in a minute because it is really important in the context of this column.
South Africa’s international financial partners convinced the government that installing new generation capacity was best left in the hands of the private sector. That is something the new government toyed with, starting with serious policy ideas developed from 1999. Former president Thabo Mbeki has admitted as much.
The Eskom shareholder (ie government) waited too long to develop new generation capacity, and in 2007, what had long been predicted, happened. A year before, Mbeki had already started working on the idea of new coal capacity: a year later, work would begin on Medupi and Kusile.
Why are so many plants suddenly breaking down?
Because many of them are really old. The energy availability factor (EAF) of some plants has dropped to the lower 30s, from highs of over 92% in the late 90s.
Former Eskom CEO Jacob Maroga said on We the Nation, which I also participated in the other day, that “engineering assets — power stations — can go to 60, 70 years. Many power stations in the world can go that long. Nuclear power stations can last 80 years.
“So the issue is not the age: the issue is your maintenance programme over the life. In Eskom, when they publish the power stations, you don’t see correlation between age and performance”.
Granted. But I am sure you know how chuffed some people are when they proudly announce that they bought their second-hand car from an old lady. Translation: older women never skip a maintenance appointment. If you got the car from that guy who always ignores the lights on the dashboard, then you have a serious problem on your hands.
Maintaining Eskom’s plants has a cost. The schedules must also be scrupulously respected, which was not always the case after 2007 when the government was desperate to keep the lights on.
Why did we suddenly start having ‘load shedding’ again in 2018?
There has been talk of sabotage and agents provocateurs, but let us focus on the bigger problem. The lull in developing new generation capacity in the 2010s was a big mistake — after the big mistake of the 2000s. If the generation capacity that was mooted in the early 2010s had been commissioned, South Africa would probably be out of the woods by now.
When the R1-trillion nuclear deal was scuppered due to allegations of corruption, the government had no Plan B. Other projects that they were banking on (Grand Inga for example) never materialised.
Is President Ramaphosa suddenly distributing IPP deals to benefit his industry friends, as well as white (and some black) monopoly capital?
Let us look at it this way. The government-driven Integrated Resource Plan aims to increase total capacity from 42,000MW (peak demand of 39,000MW) to 85,000MW (peak demand of 68,000MW) by 2030.
Why so much? Well, for starters, many industries are not performing at optimum capacity because Eskom is not providing them with enough cheap electricity. Families also need cheap electricity. At the same time, the population is growing.
The speed with which South Africa needs to install new generation capacity to help end rolling blackouts means that it has to turn to the general public and the private sector for help. It is either that, or even higher levels of rolling blackouts. A typical renewable project installs 100MW generation capacity at a cost of around two to three billion rands in under 18 months.
So are some people deliberately sabotaging Eskom so that these lucrative IPP deals can be handed to Ramaphosa’s friends and family?
This is unlikely given the dispersal and the age of the generation units. Think about it: did Ramaphosa cause Koeberg to break down? Did he cause the project errors at Medupi? Kusile?
Is Eskom going green and sacrificing its baseload capacity in the process?
The answer to that question is very easy.
Here is what Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe said about new generation capacity at Eskom only last week: “Guided by the Integrated Resource Plan, government is engaged in the procurement of additional energy from a mix of energy sources such as available gas, hydropower, nuclear, coal and battery storage.”
In other words, green projects are still going to be largely located with IPPs. So nobody has threatened to tear down South Africa’s baseload capacity, least of all US President Joe Biden, like the head of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) Joseph Mathunjwa was insinuating on We the Nation the other day.
That trade unions like Amcu and Numsa resort to attacking Biden and Patrice Motsepe for helping to kill Eskom’s baseload capacity is really disappointing. Those who want the government to build new coal and nuclear plants should be screaming that message to the government. Patrice Motsepe has nothing to do with it.
So is US President Joe Biden bullying South Africa to retire its coal fleet and build only renewables?
Do people think that President Ramaphosa is champing at the bit to plunge the South African economy into chaos and force hundreds of thousands of people out of work? Nobody wants workers to lose their jobs.
That is why the term just transition was adopted within the Conference of the Parties processes — to show that transitioning to low carbon energy sources should not destroy livelihoods and communities.
If we add up all the renewable projects in the IRP as announced by the President in his State of the Nation Address earlier this year, that still places renewables at only 25% of total generation capacity in the country.
So where are these rumours coming from?
Do you know where all the anger at US President Joe Biden is coming from? The $8.5-billion offered by America, France, Germany and the EU to help South Africa retire Komati. Seriously? People are screaming that South Africa’s baseload is under attack because a coalition of countries offered to help South Africa retire a few thousand megawatts of coal capacity. Remember that Komati, which is more than 65 years old, was abandoned, resurrected and retired again.
Renewables are so unreliable — we need more coal. We need SMRs!
The reason there is a preference for solar and wind right now is that when such projects get the all-clear, about 200MW of generation capacity can be installed within 18 months. Of course, renewables depend on the weather, and energy availability fluctuates with weather — for now — but what energy they offer is a step towards solving the problem.
Rob Hersov suggested last week that South Africa needs to build nuclear Small Modular Reactors. How is South Africa going to afford it? And when does it get connected to the grid to help end rolling blackouts?
China has just completed its Linglong 1 project (the world’s first commercial small modular reactor) and Rolls Royce is still going through the approvals stage for its SMR, but they are already heralding that as the solution to rolling blackouts in South Africa?
So what do these things cost, anyway? Well, since they’re still new it is hard to say. Estimates show that Rolls Royce’s 470MW reactors have an initial market cost of $3-billion (R54.2-billion to wait five years to get 470MW of electricity).
Who is afraid of nuclear anyway?
Remember the floods that hit Kwazulu-Natal recently? Well, eThekwini has developed a mix of energy it intends to buy, and part of that is nuclear energy. Now imagine if a nuclear power plant had been in the path of the floods — it would have been a national emergency. DM