BRETT HERRON: Ramaphosa must stop playing with the tinderbox

The state of the nation address (Sona) is traditionally a platform for the president to outline his vision for the year, set some targets and brag about his government’s successes.

One has to feel a bit sorry for the president’s speechwriters this year, because there are few successes out there. There’s only one subject on the minds of most of the people who will hear the address — electricity — and there’s precious little on that subject that hasn’t already been said.

Many who will listen to the address live in urban areas, where support for the president’s party is declining. Paradoxically, many others, who will account for the ANC’s most important constituency come the 2024 general election and who are most affected by the government’s electricity failures, won’t bother much about the Sona or Eskom.

Some of them live in rural areas with scant, if any, access to electricity anyway. Others, who might not directly consider themselves victims of the country’s electricity crisis, are those who do have access to power but cannot afford it.

These are the people, the rural and urban poor, who are the greatest casualties of Eskom’s failures, because the crisis is entrenching their positions in the cycle of poverty.

SA already ranks among the most unequal nations on earth. The state’s inability to narrow colour-coded apartheid inequality, but instead preside over deepening it, must rank as its single biggest failure.

The ability of SA’s middle class to buy their way out of the inconvenience of load-shedding by installing expensive inverters, batteries and solar panels, while members of the working class lose critical income and jobs, further tilts the have-havenot divide into unsustainable territory.

The effect on businesses similarly worsens the divide: established businesses will seek to ride the wave by installing solar, perhaps in combination with retrenching some staff, while many smaller business operators and entrepreneurs will battle to remain viable — yet the government looks to small businesses as the springboard to grow the struggling economy.

Playing with a tinderbox

Perhaps the president’s speechwriters will find a victory in the jobs being created for the importers and installers of backup power for the those who can afford it. Perhaps they’ll have licence to expand on the president’s “request” to Eskom not to implement the regulator-approved 18.6% increase for this year, because dramatically increasing the base price of electricity in the present environment is like playing with a tinderbox.

Many experts and non-experts have weighed in on the country’s load-shedding crisis. What has emerged is a mishmash of ideas conflating the need for immediate measures to stabilise the grid with the need to transition from coal to cleaner sources of energy, all while urgently increasing transmission capacity.

It’s not that the ideas are necessarily deficient, but it sometimes appears we are either getting our priorities wrong or putting all our eggs in one basket.

A few weeks ago SA’s National Energy Crisis Committee announced various plans to alleviate load-shedding and all but one holds any hope of actually alleviating load-shedding this year: the identification of six of Eskom’s 14 coal-fired power plants for what the committee describes as “particular focus”. The only short-term solution is for Eskom to fulfil its primary task: to manage its fleet of coal-fired power stations properly.

That management must include:

• Adequate intelligence and security capacity to squeeze out would-be saboteurs;
• Adequate engineering and maintenance capacity to repair and run the machines professionally and sustainably; and
• Adequate financial systems to improve procurement integrity.

Hard, parallel decisions are required from the executive. If we need to burn tanker-loads of diesel in the immediate term, as abhorrent as the thought is, it must be procured and burned. All the economists I know of have said the enormous cost of burning diesel is significantly lower than the cost of load-shedding to the economy.

If powerships really offer short-term solutions and we can mitigate environmental concerns, we must pay the price of contracting them — though not on 20-year contracts — and we must speed up the process.

A just energy transition is of huge importance, it is impossible in an economy that is gasping for breath without a stable electricity supply.

Nor can Eskom’s failures dictate the terms of a just transition. How can there be justice in a transition process characterised by the alienation of masses of people from a resource which should be their right? 

No silver bullets

The bottom line the Sona speechwriters will grapple with is that there are no silver bullets. We need a short-term strategy to keep the lights on, and a medium-term strategy to sort out grid deficiencies, procure more renewable energy more rapidly, and transition from our dependence on coal. The two strategies must be rolled out in parallel.

Theoretically, we’ll be burning coal until at least 2072/2073, when Medupi units 4, 5 and 6 — not yet in commercial operation — are scheduled for shutdown (though given the progress on Medupi its sister Kusile to date, the idea of them running for 50 years seems far-fetched).

Together with the age and deteriorating condition of certain power stations, emission standards inform Eskom’s schedule of shutting down coal-fired power stations over the next 50 years.

The Komati power station’s final unit was shut down last year, and units at Hendrina, Camden, Grootvlei, Arnot, Kriel and Tutuka are set to join it over the next seven years. Still, the bulk of the coal-fired fleet is expected to keep operating for the next 10-30 years.

What we’d like to hear from this year’s Sona is not 50 negotiated shades of grey, but a measure of comfort that there is short-term hope that our economic recovery can soon get under way.

• Herron, MP, is GOOD party secretary-general.