Johannesburg- Business Unity South Africa (BUSA) has said that it long lamented the dire economic impact of load shedding.
The country has experienced sometimes prolonged bouts of load shedding for over 13 years, despite additional capacity coming online.
BUSA said in a statement that it recognises that the fundamental issue lies in years of irreversible damage inflicted on the utility over more than a decade of state capture and corruption which resulted in the critically undermaintained plant.
“Despite the deep maintenance programme, the trend shows an increasingly worsening energy availability factor with more and more faults identified and more unplanned outages because of the ageing and poorly maintained plant,” BUSA said.
“BUSA notes the recent calls for the resignation or termination of the Eskom Executive leadership and Board. BUSA rejects these calls and stands with the Eskom leadership in these difficult times. It does not help to exacerbate the ongoing operational crisis by creating a leadership and governance crisis at Eskom,” BUSA’s statement further read.
“We are of the view this leadership has taken the tough decisions, shown remarkable openness and transparency and, critically, developed a progressive future-looking plan that will see the diversification and decarbonisation of the electricity supply system in South Africa. Eskom’s leadership has been clear, given the state and age of the plant, maintenance alone will not address the real and worsening supply crisis – new capacity must urgently be added to the grid.”
BUSA said that it maintains that the fastest, least cost and low carbon path to ensure affordable and reliable energy is through the accelerated implementation of the IRP guided REIPP programme.
“Government must urgently issue further RFP for much higher allocations of capacity. BUSA further urges emergency procurement of any capacity that can supply immediate capacity to the grid, such as through cogeneration and other technologies that participated in the previous short-term power producer programme,” BUSA went on to state.
This comes after the Black Business Council (BBC) called for the resignation of embattled power utility Eskom’s CEO, Andre de Ruyter yesterday.
The BBC said in a statement that despite congratulating him when he was appointed as Eskom’s head in 2019, de Ruyter and his board of directors should step down due to their inability to resolve the prolonged electricity blackouts.
“The BBC was overly optimistic when de Ruyter was appointed as Eskom needed stability but has since realised that two years later, the country has nothing to show but the highest number of blackouts in the history of our beloved South Africa,” Kganki Matabane, the CEO of the BBC, said.
The BBC further stated that it is of the view that the country should acknowledge that the Eskom leadership is completely overwhelmed, inept and out of its depth.
“They simply don’t seem to be able to have a handle on this crisis and as such, should be let go as there appear to be no prospect in sight for any improvement of this serious situation,” the BBC further stated.
Eskom, warned South Africans that stage 4 load shedding will be implemented from 1 pm on Monday through to 5am on Friday.
Stage 2 load shedding would then be implemented until further notice.
Eskom said that the increase in the rolling blackouts was necessary to curb the remaining emergency generation reserves after it was used extensively on Monday morning as it was not getting the reduction in demand as expected from stage two power cuts.
Eskom added that seven generation units had not returned to service as anticipated and that a unit at the Arnot power station had tripped on Monday morning, adding to the shortages.
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