Eskom delivered its State of the System briefing this week. Engineering News editor Terence Creamer attended the session and unpacks the prognosis for electricity supply for the summer months.
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South Africa’s coal-heavy power utility is moving to appoint financial advisers to assist it in structuring a potential transaction that could unlock discounted ‘green’ funding for the debt-laden State-owned entity in return for it meeting agreed decarbonisation targets. Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter reports that the utility has issued and enquiry through which it aims to secure the services of financial advisers with expertise in structuring green-finance deals and reports that several of its existing lenders, especially development finance institutions (DFIs), have expressed an appetite for participating in the arrangement.
A South African team took second place in the recent 2020 Brics Youth Energy Outlook event, hosted in Moscow. Brics is the acronym for the Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa alignment and the Youth Energy Outlook involves teams of young researchers submitting papers on energy and the energy sectors of their countries. The recent 2020 event was the third edition of the initiative and involved 190 researchers from 42 leading universities from the five Brics countries. It was a team from the University of Pretoria that secured second place for South Africa. The researchers involved were team leader and PhD candidate Vanessa Ndlovu, research assistant and PhD candidate Jessika Bohlmann, PhD student Alanda Venter, PhD student Jacobus Nel, and Masters student Ashley Gandy. (First place was taken by a Brazilian team.)
State-owned power utility Eskom, which is ramping up the maintenance of its unreliable and unpredictable coal power stations, anticipates that there will be a ‘step change’ in the performance of the fleet from April 2021, but has also warned that the risk of load-shedding will persist until at least September and will not be fully eliminated until significant new generation capacity is introduced. In fact, CEO Andre de Ruyter said during a ‘State of the System’ briefing on Thursday that far more capacity than the 11.8 GW of new non-Eskom generation earmarked for procurement by government over the coming three years would be needed to stabilise supply and create the platform for future economic growth.
South Africa’s first preference shares with an infrastructure focus were listed on October 22 on 4 Africa Exchange (4AX), Gaia Fund Managers and Kruger International Asset and Wealth Management confirmed. Gaia, together with Kruger, is listing Gaia Fund 1 (the Fund), which complies with Collective Investment Scheme regulations. The Fund’s A preference shares will trade under the ticker 4AGF1A on 4AX.
During a sitting of Parliament on the debate of the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan, Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe has reiterated government’s targets to deliver 16 313 MW of additional electricity generation capacity from a mix of energy sources.
Mantashe pointed out that an already recessive economy, coupled with the descent of the pandemic and the lockdown to halt its spread, as well as downgrades by ratings agencies, had increased the reliance on a recovery plan to provide reliable and affordable supply of energy.
Embracing digital transformation in the power and energy sector is a key step in national and regional plans to improve energy efficiency throughout sub-Saharan Africa. As economies throughout the region power up and organisations focus on how they can resume their operations, research by Schneider Electric underlines the importance of digital transformation in achieving energy efficiency, cost savings and sustainability.
The South African coal industry will likely reach a tipping point by 2025, when renewable energy should be cheaper, both in terms of capital and operational expenditure, than existing coal-fired electricity capacity. This means that, by 2030, the South African coal landscape will look “completely different”, as domestic coal production is likely to start fragmenting and shutting down, African Source Markets CEO Bevan Jones noted during a webinar on October 21. In the near-term, however, the …
Unit 2 of the Koeberg nuclear power station on October 21 successfully completed its twenty-fourth outage since it first started to generate electricity. The unit is synchronised onto the electricity grid and will load up to full capacity by next week, power utility Eskom reports.
The Competition Tribunal has dismissed the South African Energy Forum’s (SAEF’s) application to intervene in proceedings regarding the proposed large merger between Thabong Coal and South32 South Africa Coal Holdings (South African Energy Coal or SAEC).
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