After reading Gordhan's response to MPs in parliament about load shedding my heart sank. It seems he and the current Eskom chief executive's belief is that load shedding is caused by poor maintenance. The poor maintenance narrative being clever way of insinuating that incompetent blacks are responsible for load shedding.
I sincerely hope that Gordhan and his team do not actually believe that the mere presence of whites in top management of Eskom is what is required to stabilize Eskom. Because if that is their thinking, it means they are clueless about the problem they are dealing with.
According to the report Gordhan said, "The bottom line, honourable member, is that until we can put a few more thousand megawatts onto the system we cannot be definite. To achieve more output, the utility would have to do better maintenance and operations."
He did not mention more power stations or sources. Yet the simple truth is the power stations South Africa currently has simply cannot generate enough power for a fully served population (not partially served like under apartheid).
Gordhan and his team do not support their claim that load-shedding is caused by poor maintenance with any facts. There should be accurate reliability statistics. Figures like mean time to (MTTF) failure, mean time to repair (MTTR) and the overall availability of units as a percentage of the time the units are operating relative to total time they are expected to be operating. Detailed reliability figures and root cause analysis are the only way of truthfully telling why units are failing too often and whether the root cause of downtime is lack of maintenance.
The poor maintenance narrative also whitewashes the simple fact that since the dawn of democracy the growth of electricity demand has far outstripped the growth of supply. The number of people supplied with electricity has grown from 14 million people in 1994 (35% of the population then) to over 51million people (85% of the population) now. That is three and a half times demand growth.
Yet electricity generating capacity has grown from 38 gigawatts to 58 gigawatts only. That is a one and half times growth in supply. You do not need to be a rocket scientist to figure that what is required is a rapid growth in supply.
While it is easy to grow the distribution network (demand side) because it is cheap and quick to add suburbs and factories to the distribution grid, growing supply is difficult. It requires massive lumpsums of money and lengthy construction periods to build power stations. That is why upfront planning must be meticulous for decades into future.
In this case upfront planning FOR THE ENTIRE POPULATION was non-existent under apartheid. When the ANC took over they focused on the easy part, growing the distribution network which can be easily dealt with in municipal budgets. Growing the supply which requires a massive national budget was not adequately funded.
It is my belief that the ANC were not correctly advised on growing the electricity supply capacity. I have mentioned before that the apartheid government had plans to tap into the hydro-capacity of the big rivers to the north.
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| Matimba-Insukamini 400KV transmission line (in black). |
Despite then ongoing hostility with independent African countries, they built the Cabora Basa to Midrand DC transmission line. They also built the Matimba (near Lephalale) to Insukamini (near Bulawayo) high voltage transmission line which was completed in 1995. That was part of a strategy to transmit power from the north down to South Africa.
The question is how come the ANC did not follow through with the strategy? The ANC are politicians, and it would have been up to the energy experts to make the politicians understand. Did the politicians fail to listen? Or did the energy experts not offer their advice knowing that the shortage of electricity would become a political club to bludgeon the ANC with in future. Clearly in the November 2021 election that has just passed the ANC was clobbered to below 50% and load-shedding was one of the reasons cited by its voting base.
My biggest concern is the discussions going on around the electricity issue are just not correct especially since de Ruyter took charge of Eskom. There is a lot of waffling about maintenance. Yet the fact of life is that there is always scheduled and unscheduled maintenance on any power grid.
The conventional wisdom is for electricity supply security your capacity should be about 20% more than your peak demand. At the very least it should be 10% more than your peak demand.
That is where the figure of 6gigawatts more being needed in South Africa is coming from. The country has a capacity of about 58gigwatts and 10% of that is 6gigawatts. That is based on the assumption that since we are experiencing a supply shortfall at 58GW, that must be the peak demand.
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| Regional power transmission strategy. Power transmission lines between countries are in red. |
The second issue I have is there seems to be no coherent enunciation of where the extra electricity supply is going to come from. Especially given promises to eliminate coal in 15 years made by Ramaphosa in Glasgow.
De Ruyter keeps talking about past and current corruption. All and good, but the absence of corruption is not going to create the extra generating capacity that is lacking. The being no corruption simply means you can use what you have more efficiently.
Unless De Ruyter is a messiah who can feed thousands with two fish and five loaves there is no way he can end load-shedding in the next 2 years or so. Stopping corruption is simply stopping thieves from stealing a fish and loaf from the meagre collection, but even without the thieves, it is still not enough.
What South Africa needs to hear from De Ruyter is the vision and strategy of where the 6gigawatt shortfall in capacity is going to come from. Mind you that figure is based on an assumption that the peak capacity now is the peak demand as well.
Given that there are people who want electricity but are not even connected to the grid, actual peak demand is likely to be higher. I am going to throw bones here because I do not have reliable statistics but my guess is actual peak demand now should be around 70gigawatts.
Going back to the news reports that triggered this blog post, it is clear that Minister Gordhan and the Eskom executive are busy waffling politics. None of what has been reported as coming from them over the past few months comes anywhere close to a coherent energy strategy.
Nearly all of it is political blame-shifting tinged with insinuations that recent black executives of Eskom are incompetent or saboteurs. He is engaging in some rubber-man antics to dodge responsibility for South Africa's electricity woes. Granted he is just another jockey appointed to ride a dead horse (De Ruyter's his own words) he is not clear what his plans to acquire a live horse are. Even a donkey will do as long as it is alive.
Since the dawn of democracy South Africa has needed a strategy to expand electricity availability very rapidly. It does not look like any serious as effort has been in place and load-shedding are the chickens coming home to roost.
References
- Increase of power transmission capacity in South Africa-Zimbabwe interconnection by means of SVC - ABB Ltd public document.
- The Southern African Power Pool: Regional Cooperation - a slide by DR Lawrence Musaba
- De Ruyter: It's a 'myth' that state capture at Eskom is over - News24 report
- There is a plan to end load-shedding, but it will take time: Pravin Gordhan - Timelive report
