South Africa’s leading power utility, state-owned Eskom, warned the public on Friday that it must be prepared to continue to face a power crisis that has been dragging on for several months, although it has promised a respite of sorts by Christmas Day.
South Africa is experiencing a crisis of unprecedented power cuts and blackouts thanks to a mix of multiple factors, such as corruption and incompetence, but also sabotage and precarious facilities and obsolete power plants that still run on coal.
This is the case of the 40-year-old main nuclear power plant near Cape Town, which supplies much of the country. These facilities are scheduled to be decommissioned next year for refurbishment work, depriving the power grid of valuable megawatts.
The company’s Chief Operating Officer, Jan Oberholzer, has said that the first three months of 2023 will be «difficult», a period, he stressed, that «is going to be really complicated», reports the Africa News portal.
Eskom’s outgoing CEO, Andre de Ruyter, who will remain in office until March after submitting his resignation a few weeks ago, citing lack of political support and corruption as the main stumbling blocks to solving this problem, has expressed himself along these lines.
«The prospects for next year are very limited», as the country would need between 4,000 and 6,000 megawatts of additional capacity for the grid, explained De Ruyter. For its part, the government has reported that cases of sabotage are occurring as a result of fraud and corruption, and announced last week the deployment of small battalions of soldiers to protect four power plants and expel criminal organizations from there.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
