Cape Town load shedding could be worse than the rest of South Africa, premier warns
Western Cape premier Alan Winde has warned that delays at the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station could see the province suffer load shedding stages higher than the rest of the country – especially if both units of the station are offline at the same time.
Winde met with the national minister for Electricity Kgosientsho Ramokgopa this week, where the Western Cape Energy Council was presented with an update on the national government’s Energy Action Plan to address mass power outages in the country.
While the provincial government welcomed aspects of the plan, it expressed deep concern over the delays in refurbishing the Koeberg Nuclear Power Staton, which has already been set back by months.
“Every day this process is delayed brings us closer to a catastrophic increase in the severity of blackouts, particularly for the Western Cape, which will be hugely detrimental to our residents and economy,” Winde said.
“We have accelerated our economic growth and job creation drive through our Growth for Jobs strategy, and we cannot afford to have both of Koeberg’s units offline simultaneously.”
Winde said that the worry for the Western Cape is that if both generation units at Koeberg are taken offline at the same time, the province will experience an additional level of load shedding relative to the rest of South Africa.
“I must emphasise to the residents of the Western Cape that our concern is not a nuclear one, but rather an even further constraint on our energy supply. We must understand how Eskom is going to mitigate this possibility and plan to manage this dual outage at Koeberg.” he said.
The premier said that the province is willing to work fully with the minister, Eskom and other stakeholders to tackle the energy crisis with he urgency it needs.
For his part, Ramokgopa shared the WCG’s disquiet regarding the maintenance schedule at Koeberg, saying he has written to the Eskom board requesting a comprehensive report.
Koeberg’s unit 1 was brought offline at the end of last year and was expected to come back online in June 2023. However, this target was missed, and the date pushed back even further to September. This date is now also in doubt – with the second unit expected to be brought offline in October.
Huge cost to the economy
The Western Cape government noted that South Africa will lose an estimated R725 billion to the economy this year due to load shedding – and that this is a conservative estimate.
According to data from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 2022, the elevation of load shedding at the end of the year brought the total economic cost of the outages to the economy to R560 billion for the year.
Load shedding in 2023 has been far worse, and is expected to continue throughout the year and mid- to high stages.
The South African Reserve Bank estimates that the direct nominal cost of load shedding to the economy is around R900 million a day at stage 6.
However, the knock-on impact on the economy is more severe, with the central bank noting that outages will wipe two percentage points of GDP growth from the economy in 2023.
Read: South African households are beating Eskom at its own game with rooftop solar
Loading ...