HILARY JOFFE: Using ‘flexible facts’, the government is set to repeat mistakes at Eskom
Komati’s history of decommissioning needs to be looked at before reusing old power stations
Some of our cabinet ministers want Eskom’s Komati power station reopened. Perhaps they forget, or never knew, that Komati should never have been on the grid in the first place. Nor should the other two “return to service” Grootvlei and Camden stations.
The reason they were returned to service was that Eskom’s new build programme started way too late. That was because the government had made such a mess of its energy policy in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Restarting the three elderly stations was always meant to be an interim solution to plug the gap while Medupi and Kusile were belatedly being built. As it turned out, the return to service project proved more difficult, costly and contentious than expected. And that short-term solution has now turned into a longer-term political problem. ..
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