The South African National Energy Development Institute (SANEDI) has criticised the move by Eskom to implement stage 6 load shedding.
SANEDI says it doubts that the country will see the load shedding crisis resolved any time soon.
This week’s rolling blackouts come after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s pronouncements in his 2024 State of the Nation Address that the end of rolling blackouts was in sight.
The power utility announced stage 6 of rolling blackouts after two generation units broke down.
The institute says most of the challenges at Eskom can be attributed to an aging coal fleet that continues to operate with inconsistencies.
SANEDI Energy Secretariat’s Prof. Sampson Mamphweli says, “We are looking at about a year and that is also dependent on the fixing of the coal fleet. We are sitting at about 15000 megawatts in unplanned capacity loss factor, which is basically the breakdowns, so that needs to go down drastically to about 5000 megawatts or so for us to see the end of load shedding.”
“There are other measures that will still need to come on board, there are issues around demand side management and the energy efficiency, there are geyser control programmes that still need to come on board, NECOM has done quite a lot of work around that, government still needs to bring in money to implement those kinds of programmes.”
VIDEO: Ramaphosa says it’s difficult to stipulate when load shedding will end:
