LETTER: Cut jobs at bloated Eskom to avoid tariff hike

President Cyril Ramaphosa's request that Eskom hold off on its 18.6% tariff hike refers (“Someone’s got to pay for the electricity, Mr President”, January 26).

SA needs to understand that Eskom’s by-product is electricity — its real role is to employ 40,000 mainly unskilled and militant employees.

In 2003, Eskom generated about 39,000MW with 31,000 employees, then over the next decade and a half it went and hired another 17,000 employees even as actual generation fell.

According to Singh & Fehrs’ 2001 analysis of US Energy Information Administration data, the average coal-fired power plant employs 0.18 people in operations & maintenance per MW of peak capacity on a permanent basis. A 300MW coal-fired power plant would thus employ 54 people in operation and maintenance on an ongoing basis.

This corresponds closely with the Energy Information Administration’s assessment that in 1997 the average 300MW  coal-fired power plant in the US had 53 employees.

Therefore, to produce 39,000MW Eskom needs about 7,100 people to run the coal operated fleet, and a further 600 for Koeberg. That’s 7,700 people in total.

The American Electric Power utility produces about the same power as Eskom (38,000MW) with a total of 16,000 employees, and that includes 63,000km of transmission lines.

Most of us would imagine that a power utility company would employ mainly technical skills. Yet in 2013 Eskom had 2,500 qualified engineers and in 2022 there were just 1,500, with 200 critical skills quitting each month.

By my calculation Eskom, therefore, has 26,000 surplus employees being paid a total of R15bn a year. On Eskom’s R246bn turnover we have now found an 8% potential saving.

I am sure with aggressive cost cutting we could find the other 10% and make the 18% tariff hike unnecessary.

Rob Tiffin
Cape Town

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