SA Electricity Supply Uncertain For Five Years 4
The electricity supply crisis will not be getting better for at least another five years, with our reserve generating capacity being less than half of what it should be. Eskom plans to spend R97 billion rand over the next five years to bring our reserves up to the benchamrk 15% reserve capacity.
The cause of this complete balls up can be laid squarely at the feet of government, specifically the cabinet, who barred Eskom from building any new power plants from 2001 – 2004 although one must wonder why Eskom didn’t start furiously building power plants after 2004. Cabinet barred Eskom from building new plants in the hope of attracting private investors, but they didn’t do much else besides that. So much for the efficiency of central planning.
The electricity landscape is quite uncertain with some municipalities (such as Cape Town) buying power via Regional Electricity Distributors (who are always being threatened with closure) and others buying direct from Eskom or other third parties. With the enormous capital outlay required to build power stations you can understand why private investors didn’t swoop in.
Unfortunately this is not the only area where government has made a decree and then sat back to watch nothing else happen. After Telkom lost their “official” fixed line monopoly (which still exits for all intents and purposes) it took five years before anyone was prepared to invest in a competitor and they only did so with significant government investment as well (Neotel is 30% state owned).
I wonder which industry will be next to suffer the stellar planning of cabinet.
One really obvious thing missing in South Africa is the mechanism to allow individuals to sell their excess electricity back to the grid. In most developed countries, individuals can blanket their house with solar panels (often highly subsidised), reducing their own demand, and also generating excess for the grid.
Solar panels pay themselves off in around 20/30 years with SA’s current low rates. Selling excess power back, subsidies, and more expensive electricity would make options like solar/wind on farms/houses so much more viable. All this would reduce the need for these disastrous massively centralised nuclear power stations, etc.
Nuclear power stations are not ‘disastrous’.
Perhaps it’s a strong word, but a relying on a technology where we haven’t yet worked out a way to dispose of the highly toxic byproducts is as head in the sand as living in a house with a blocked toilet – eventually we have a problem.
I’m partial to dumping nuclear waste in subductions zones between tectonic plates myself.
An anecdote I heard (so I take no responsibility over accuracy) said that the outback soil of Australia has enough natural radiation in it already that putting the waste there would actually lower the average background radiation.