Johannesburg will get no special treatment from Eskom when it hosts a major Brics summit later this month, Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has said. The 15th Brics summit will take place at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg between 22 and 24 August.
Government has again moved to dismiss suggestions that the unbundling of the Eskom generation, transmission and distribution businesses into three separate entities can be regarded as privatisation, noting that it is in line with a long-standing policy as well as a restructuring plan for Eskom approved by Cabinet in 2019. “We are not selling anything,” the Presidency’s Rudi Dicks stressed at a regular briefing on the implementation of the Energy Action Plan, hosted weekly by Electricity Minister Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa.
Government reports that Eskom has spent R9.2-billion on diesel since the start of the State-owned utility’s financial year on April 1, which it claims to be marginally below an initial budget for the period of R9.7-billion. The Presidency’s Rudi Dicks provided the figure during a regular weekly update on the implementation of the Energy Action Plan, during which Electricity Minister Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa reiterated that it had always been Eskom’s intention to use the open-cycle gas turbines to reduce winter loadshedding.
The Just Energy Transition (JET) framework inadequately addresses the issue of gender inequalities, says the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC), explaining that the need for gender equity is being prioritised in further planning processes in the JET, with an emphasis on implementation. In a dialogue hosted on August 11, the PCC unpacked how the oversight of gender inequality had been raised on various platforms by stakeholders, especially since climate change exacerbates existing inequalities and increases the vulnerability of women, the marginalised and underrepresented populations.
Energy Council of South Africa CEO James Mackay believes an expedited promulgation of the Electricity Regulation Amendment (ERA) Bill together with the unbundling of Eskom will send a clear signal to stakeholders and investors that the “political will” exists to place the country’s poorly performing electricity sector on a sustainable pathway. He tells Engineering News that South Africa’s current market structure, which is dominated by a single vertically integrated utility, is out of line with the markets in operation in other developed and developing economies and is, thus, an impediment to much-needed generation, transmission and distribution investment.
Engineering News editor Terence Creamer discusses the latest developments with regard to the Koeberg nuclear power station, a big battery storage programme and the unbundling of Eskom.
Amid ongoing power outages and energy constraints, new approaches to fuel selection and efficiency among chemical plants have become necessary, says boiler and energy plant operations and maintenance service provider Associated Energy Services (AES) commercial director Dennis Williams. Any opportunity to manage the efficient generation and supply of energy carriers, such as steam or thermal oil, presents an opportunity to improve efficiencies in a chemical plant’s main production process, owing to chemical plants being energy intensive.
Global solutions provider Tenova and leading power conversion company GE Power Conversion signed a Cooperation Agreement in June, combining their efforts on target projects that are aimed at offering and implementing innovative power feeding solutions based on medium-voltage power converters, for electric arc furnace (EAF) or submerged arc furnace (SAF) technologies. Tenova and GE’s collaboration was formed to jointly design and market tailored medium-voltage power feeding systems for EAFs and SAFs, allowing the effective use of high electric power even on constrained grids, while reducing both operating costs and the environmental impact of new and pre-existing furnaces.
Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan has given an assurance that there is no plan to privatise any of the three Eskom entities of generation, transmission and distribution currently being unbundled in line with a policy initially outline in the so-called ‘Eskom Roadmap’ of 2019. In a statement clarifying a letter sent to the Eskom board regarding the restructuring of the distribution company, but which included the words “approval for sale”, sparking speculation that the business was being privatised, Gordhan insisted that the entity would remain fully State owned.
State-owned electricity utility Eskom has confirmed that Unit 1 at the Koeberg nuclear power station, in the Western Cape, is currently scheduled to return to service only on November 3. The unit entered an extended outage on December 10 last year, which was initially scheduled to be completed in 180 days and returned to service in June.
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