Murray & Roberts (M&R) CEO Henry Laas has described the group’s loss of control over RUC Cementation Mining Contractors as a consequence of its Australian holding company, or MRPL, having been placed into voluntary administration as a particularly “tragic” consequence of recent “devastating” developments. MRPL and its subsidiaries together with Clough, previously M&R’s largest business unit by far, entered voluntary administration on December 5 after Clough experienced serious funding pressures as a result of factors such as Covid disruptions and a surge in working capital requirements at two key projects, Traveler and Waitsia.
South Africa should prioritise its decarbonisation strategy, as it has a carbon intensity much higher than most countries, and $1.5-billion of exports to the European Union (EU) are at risk in the short term. That figure is likely to increase when more products are covered under the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), said policy development research institution Trade and Industrial Policies Strategies (TIPS).
The electricity shortages in South Africa, which have resulted in continuous loadshedding, are severely affecting people and businesses and, consequently, the economy and employment, specialists from law firm Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr (CDH) noted during a briefing on March 2. They stressed that any directives issued by ministers during the state of disaster – declared to find solutions to the energy crisis – must be necessary, rational and justified to meet legal requirements.
Eskom has announced that Stage 4 loadshedding will continue to be implemented until 16:00 on Thursday. Thereafter, Stage 5 loadshedding will be implemented from 16:00 on Thursday until 05:00 on Saturday. Stage 4 loadsshedding will then be implemented from 05:00 on Friday until 05:00 on Saturday, whereafter it will be reduced to Stage 3 until 16:00 on Saturday.
Calculations by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were that, in Africa, some 600-million people and 10-million small businesses lacked a dependable electricity supply. Nor did connection to a national grid guarantee a reliable supply of energy. The World Bank has reported that nearly 80% of the continent’s businesses suffer from power cuts. The continent has a huge need for reliable energy sources. Consequently, Nuclear Business Platform (NBP) MD Zaf Coelho points out, an increasing number of African countries are looking at nuclear power as a source of reliable baseload energy. Hence the second, 2023, iteration of the Africa NBP (AFNBP) conference, which will take place in Kampala, Uganda, from March 14 to March 17. It will be hosted by the Ugandan Ministry of Energy & Mineral Development, and its theme is the “Sustainable Economic Transformation of Africa Through Nuclear Power”.
Global energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions increased by less than 1% in 2022, according to new analysis published by the International Energy Agency (IEA). The ‘CO2 Emissions in 2022’ report, which is the first in a new series called the ‘Global Energy Transitions Stocktake’, shows that emissions grew by 0.9%, or 321-million tonnes, reaching a new high of more than 36.8-billion tonnes.
In his letter to the employees of Eskom of 2023, buried in a time capsule in 1999 near to the ‘rock man’ energy statue at the entrance of Megawatt Park, then CEO Allen Morgan highlighted two challenges facing the utility – challenges that subsequently morphed into serious problems that are now weighing heavily on an organisation that marked its hundredth birthday on March 1 with Stage 4 loadshedding. The letter was unearthed together with the other contents of the time capsule at an event held at Megawatt Park on February 15 and attended by both Morgan and then CEO André de Ruyter.
South Africa’s only opposition-led province plans to facilitate the construction of almost 6 GW of power generation capacity to counter nationwide electricity shortages and bolster the regional economy. The Western Cape aims to add as much as 750 MW of supply by 2025 and to reach 5 700 MW by 2035, Premier Alan Winde, a member of the Democratic Alliance, said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Cape Town office on Wednesday. That should be sufficient to meet demand as the provincial economy expands.
The KwaZulu-Natal provincial executive council (PEC) has approved the eThekwini metropolitan municipality’s procurement plan for an initial 400 MW of new generation capacity from independent power producers. This will create 8 000 job opportunities through a public-private partnership (PPP), mayor Mxolisi Kaunda announced at the Energy Transformation Summit, in Durban, on March 1.
The reform-related conditions outlined by the National Treasury as part of a R254-billion Eskom debt-relief package – including the concessioning of coal power stations to the private sector and allowing for private sector participation in the building and operation of grid infrastructure – “make sense” and are necessary both in the context of the just energy transition and revelations of embedded corruption withing Eskom’s coal supply-chain. This is the conclusion arrived at by a team of economists at the University of Witwatersrand’s Public Economy Project, who have published an analysis and commentary on the 2023 Budget.
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