Jeff Radebe breaks gridlock in electricity generation
Nersa told to license applications from business to generate power and feed it into national grid
Energy minister Jeff Radebe has opened the way for businesses to generate their own electricity and feed this into the national grid. The move is a crucial development that will assist in alleviating electricity supply constraints and open the generation market to enable more private entities to provide power alongside Eskom. The state-owned power utility is battling to keep the lights on and has been burning diesel at great cost since March to close the supply gap and prevent load-shedding. Radebe wrote to the National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa) earlier this week informing it that it was permitted to go ahead and license applications from industrial, agricultural, mining and other enterprises to generate their own electricity in projects with between 1MW and 10MW capacity without waiting for the promulgation of the new Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), which is still under discussion at Nedlac. Department of energy officials confirmed on Tuesday that Radebe had given Nersa permis...
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