Power utility, Eskom has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. From retrenchments, suspicious dealings and recently, load shedding.
General Manager for investment strategy at Eskom, Andrew Etzinger says the main issue that Eskom is facing is transporting coal from Mpumalanga to other power stations.
“We are making good progress but it is slow, it is agonizingly slow to recover our coal stock pile levels.”
“Other problems include lack of maintenance over the last three years, critical skill gaps and development at power stations manager level to operator level” which Etzinger says are being dealt with.
Etzinger says that apart of power contains there are also financial constrains hence why the power utility continues to export power to neighboring countries.
“We do export power in limited quantities to our neighboring countries bearing in mind that their economies are tiny in comparison to South Africa’s economy. So these are relatively small amounts of power but part of the agreement that we have with those utilities is that when we do hit a constraint we would cut back on those contracts.”
According to Etzinger over the next month plans are in place to do a huge amount of maintenance will be done to fix the generators which will last for 12-months as well as the running the new power stations which will be a game changer for the power utility as well as South Africa.
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