In his 8th Energy Digicon, Premier Alan Winde urged citizens to make their views known on the bid by the Finance Minister to exempt Eskom from the Public Finance Management Act.
This would see the power utility not disclosing its expenditure, widely considered as irregular, fruitless and wasteful, in its annual financial statements for the pervious financial year and the following two years.
Special Advisor on Energy to the Premier Alwie Lester gave an update on the status of South Africa’s power system for the week ahead, focusing on what is called the Energy Availability Factor (EAF) which, in the 14th week of 2023, was at 51,63%. A satisfactory EAF is between 85% and 87%.
This deficit in EAF is translated into citizens enduring higher stages of blackouts – most likely stages 5 and 6.
In his presentation, Bruce Raw, Chief Strategy Officer at GreenCape, explained some of the misconceptions around key concepts in the energy crisis.
He first looked at the differences among dispatchability, variable and baseload.
He then moved on to the importance of renewable energy.
Citing a study done by Meridian Economics, Raw showed that despite load shedding being catastrophically worse in 2022 than 2021, 5GW of additional renewable energy would have eliminated between 71% and 92% of load shedding, depending on the supplementary measures to relieve diesel-supply constraints.
“What we need to get out of the load shedding hole we are in now is for a lot more energy to come online,” he said. “New power is vital.”
Raw then unpacked the concept of “going off the grid”, which he said can be very misleading and confusing.
He explained: “Typically what is really happening here is additional generation is occurring. Some municipalities are trying to decrease the amount of power they need to purchase from Eskom, but their reliance is still very heavily on the national grid. This is a good thing. The national grid is an asset.”
On small-scale embedded generation (SSEG) Raw spoke of the licensing regulation limit on this form of power generation that has been amended.
This is enabling more municipalities and households to turn to SSEG, which is happening across the Western Cape.
Regarding the issue of municipal revenue loss through more people and businesses installing solar photovoltaic (PV) to benefit from tax incentives:
“Those incentives are an important mechanism to adding power. Private-sector procurement of renewables is probably the shortest-term new power generation we will see come onto the grid, so it is an important space for us to consider.”
He said in the context of a failing national utility and load shedding it doesn’t make sense to argue that new generation threatens revenue.
Municipal revenue has already been lost and the model of reselling Eskom power relies on having power to sell.
Additional capacity is ultimately replacing levels of load shedding, not existing sales.
Even at a feed-in price of 1-1 on a macro-level total municipal revenue is better off.
In the meantime Eskom announced stage 4 load shedding was implemented from 16:00 Sunday (23 April) afternoon until 05:00 on Monday followed by Stage 3 load shedding from 05:00 to 16:00.
This pattern of Stage 3 and Stage 4 load shedding will be repeated daily until further notice.
