Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa says Eskom’s new CEO, Dan Marokane, will offer a comprehensive outline of a revised generation recovery plan that will seek to integrate recommendations arising from various expert reports into the state of the coal power stations, including the hard-hitting Vgbe report commissioned by the National Treasury. However, Eskom Generation’s Eric Shunmagum also reported “some inaccuracies” with the report’s findings, which required further engagement with the National Treasury before the recommendations could be integrated.
Construction group Wilson Bayly Holmes-Ovcon (WBHO) is installing large-scale solar panel arrays on the rooftops of three buildings of its headquarters in Johannesburg. The first of the three buildings will be fully operational this month, with the other two to follow between the end of April and the beginning of May.
The share price of JSE-listed energy storage and automotive components company Metair rose by more than 26% on March 11, after the company announced that it expected to report earnings a share of 44c to 53c and headline earnings a share of 128c to 140c for the 2023 financial year. This compares with the loss a share of 21c and the headline loss a share of 17c reported for the 2022 financial year.
Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa and the Independent Power Producer Office (IPPO) have both confirmed that the curtailment framework outlined by Eskom in January is immediately available to wind IPPs preparing to bid under Bid Window Seven (BW7) of South Africa’s public renewables procurement programme, launched in December. Published as an addendum to the latest Generation Connection Capacity Assessment (GCCA 2025), the framework states that 3 470 MW of additional grid capacity to connect wind generation will be made available by accepting a “reasonable share of no more than 10% of curtailment”.
While the gross domestic product (GDP) for the fourth quarter of 2023 was 0.1%, growth was negative in terms of GDP per capita, given that population growth is outpacing it. “We have been trending lower since 2013, and have now crowned a decade of negative per capita growth. South Africans now earn, in real terms, on average, what they earned in 2006,” business organisation Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) CEO Busi Mavuso points out in her latest weekly newsletter.