An urgent piece of legislation that is key to overcoming SA’s energy crisis has yet to be introduced into Parliament, it emerged on Wednesday, raising the fear that it will not be passed this year. The Electricity Regulation Amendment Bill was approved by the Cabinet in March with the promise by Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni that it would be prioritised.
Norwegian entities, as existing investors with more than 3 GW of renewable energy projects in South Africa, are eager to facilitate more business between the two countries and further into the African continent, particularly as South Africa is undertaking regulatory reforms to liberalise its energy market. In a panel discussion hosted by Oslo-headquartered renewable energy company Scatec on August 15, Norwegian Ambassador to South Africa Gjermund Sæther said South Africa was a leader on the African continent, showing increasing potential for business-to-business cooperation.
Resources investment company Menar MD Vuslat Bayoglu has emphasised that South Africa is on the precipice of a significant industrial revolution. Fuelling this revolution, however, will require a consistent and reliable baseload power source that can only be produced by coal-fired power stations, despite calls from more developed countries for South Africa to reduce its coal-fired power station capacity to achieve sustainability and carbon dioxide emission reduction goals, he said on the first day of the Southern African Coal Processing Society International Coal Conference, in Secunda, Mpumalanga, on August 15.
Turkish energy company Karpowership, which has been seeking to implement three ship-based power projects in South Africa after being named one of the preferred bidders in the government’s Risk Mitigation Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (RMIPPPP), is “very confident” that the projects will proceed, despite prolonged regulatory setbacks. “It has been two years of going through all these processes and the only remaining licence to get are the environmental licences,” Karpowership South Africa and regional director Mehmet Katmer said during a visit to one of the company’s current projects in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, last week.
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.
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