SOUTH AFRICA LOOKS TOWARDS ZAMBIA TO END LOADSHEDING
When South African president President Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the energy crisis in his country yesterday, he outlined sweeping plans to deal with a prolonged energy crisis and he looked towards Zambia for a solution.
This month, South Africa endured almost two weeks of stage-6 load shedding, which entails multiple power cuts a day, each lasting between two and four hours.
In planning a way out of the crisis, Ramaphosa said that the beleaguered public utility firm ESKOM, which generates more than 90 percent of the country’s energy, will increase the budget for critical maintenance and add new capacity to the grid “on an urgent basis”. Over the next three months, ESKOM will take additional actions to add new generation capacity to the grid on an urgent basis.
As part of addressing the shortage of megawatts and as an immediate measure, ESKOM will now purchase additional energy from existing private independent power producers or generators such as mines, paper mills, shopping centres and other private entities that have surplus power. These are power plants which built more capacity than was required and can now supply this excess power to ESKOM.
And as a medium term plan, Ramaphosa said that his country would source power from Zambia.
“A number of our neighbouring countries in Southern Africa, such as Botswana and Zambia, have more electricity capacity than they require. Eskom will now import power from these countries through the Southern African Power Pool arrangement,” the South African leader said.
This increases the ready market for our power. We are already exporting to Namibia and Zimbabwe. Angola and Zambia also want to interconnect the electricity grids of two neighbouring nations and see the supply of electricity from Zambia to Angola, at a time when, Zambia is producing electric energy beyond its consumption capacity. Smart Energy, a registered Zambian firm, is leading the initiative that aims to electrify the various regions of Eastern Angola.
Good morning.
Hon. Eng. Peter Chibwe Kapala
Minister of Energy
- 2022