EDITORIAL: Necom not quite on track to end load-shedding

The question minister of electricity Kgosientsho Ramokgopa gets asked every Sunday at his now regular weekly briefing on progress with the energy action plan is also the one he does not have any clear answer for: “When will load-shedding end?”

Ramokgopa has been at pains to explain over the last couple of months that the government does not want to commit to a specific date when SA will emerge from the electricity crisis because there are too many uncertainties. In addition, he says, the intention is not only to close the current gap between electricity supply and demand, but to create some breathing room and capacity for the economy to grow.

SA businesses, which are now actively involved in solving the crisis, say it will take another two to three years to eliminate the risk of load-shedding. But there really is no simple answer to when the crisis will be well and truly behind us.

The best we can do is look at the progress the national energy crisis committee (Necom) has made in implementing the energy action plan.

The plan is based on measures announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa in July 2022 amid the return of stage 6 load-shedding. By Necom’s own account it has completed or made good progress on about 60% of the actions that are to be achieved under the plan.

But this is perhaps not a clear reflection of real progress when you consider that 40% of actions that have not yet been achieved include tammeletjies such as “fixing Eskom”. Progress on improving Eskom’s generation performance is subjective. Ramokgopa, in his weekly updates, judges progress by using the worst-performing months as a baseline.

During Eskom’s dark months of April and May the energy availability factor (EAF) — a measure of electricity output as a share of total installed generation capacity — declined to about 52%. Compared to this, performance in June and July has improved to an average of about 58%. However, if you make a like-for-like comparison, generation performance is worse than last year. The June and July average in 2022 was about 60%.

To achieve the targets in the energy action plan, Eskom has to achieve an average EAF of 60% for the current financial year up to end-March 2024. The average for the four months to end-July is about 55%.

Getting to the 60% average relies mostly on meeting its deadlines to bring back four units at Kusile (with combined capacity of about 2,800MW) on schedule by December 25. Previous experience with Kusile, Medupi and more recently Koeberg allows us to be sceptical about whether Eskom will be able to stick to its December deadline.

Another critical part of the plan is bringing on new generation capacity. This will come almost exclusively from renewables. There are already many delays with this — due to the fact that bid window 6 of the renewable energy independent power producer procurement programme achieved only a fraction of the more than 5,000MW the government hoped to procure, and there is still no sight of bid window 7 that was supposed to launch at the end of July.

On a positive note, the private sector has far outperformed expectations. The plan provided for 850MW to be added via rooftop solar installed by businesses and households — actual installed capacity for the first half of the year already stands at about 1,400MW.