Nersa committee holds back approval on Eskom application to buy short-term power

The National Energy Regulator of South Africa’s (Nersa’s) electricity subcommittee decided, on February 5, not to approve Eskom’s application for the emergency procurement of electricity from eight private generators under its Short-Term Power Purchase Programme (STPPP). In March 2020, the State-owned utility issued a request for proposals for supply of short-term power under the STPPP scheme, which was first initiated in October 2012 to help Eskom mitigate its capacity constraints and reduce the risk of load-shedding.
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Eskom supports lifting licensing exemption threshold for electricity generation to 50MW

Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter has expressed support for a lifting of the licensing threshold on distributed generators from 1 MW to 50 MW. Engineering News editor Terence Creamer unpacks the significance of this statement.  
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Eskom to implement power cuts from midday

South Africa’s struggling state power utility Eskom said on Friday that it would implement scheduled power cuts from 12:00 until Sunday evening. Eskom said on its Twitter feed that outages would be “stage 2”, which allow for up to 2 000 MW of the national load to be shed. It added that more information would follow.
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US-based scientists develop global extreme wind speed atlas to help wind energy sector

Scientists at Cornell University’s Cornell Atkinson Centre for Sustainability, in Ithaca in New York state in the US, have developed a new, digital, global wind atlas. Entitled “A Global Assessment of Extreme Wind Speeds for Wind Energy Applications”, it was unveiled in a paper published in the journal Nature Energy on January 25. It is the first geospatially explicit (that is, its datasets are connected with locations), uniform and publicly available source of information on extreme wind speeds. “Cost-efficient expansion of the wind-energy industry is enabled by access to this newly released digital atlas of the extreme wind conditions under which wind turbines will operate at locations around the world,” pointed out Cornell Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Sara Pryor. “This kind of information will ensure the correct selection of wind turbines for specific deployment and help ensure cost-efficient and dependable electricity generation from those turbines.”
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