Let’s be honest about load shedding : CEO

With load shedding having been suspended for most of the day for three weeks in a row, South Africans are breathing a sigh of relief – but this shouldn’t lead to the false hope that the electricity crisis is behind us, says Business Leadership South Africa CEO, Busi Mavuso.
“Our electricity system remains unable to deliver for our economy. As we go deeper into winter, the pressure on it will increase, and load shedding is very likely to reach record levels,” she said.
“Eskom plant performance has improved over the last two weeks, showing an energy availability factor (EAF) of 60%, which is one of the main reasons for lower load shedding levels. That is an achievement, even though the targets for EAF are 65% this year and 70% next year. That is not achievable, and we need to be honest about what is.”
Writing in her weekly newsletter, Mavuso said that work is being done by the government, in partnership with businesses, to address the country’s power crisis – but even as progress is being made and plans are slowly coming to fruition, many questions remain and more needs to be done.
At a National Energy Crisis Committee (Necom) briefing on Sunday (25 June), electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa briefed the public on the state of the grid and plans to tackle the crisis.
One year after the Necom was formed, some remarkable measures have been implemented, Mavuso said, including the registering of 4,200MW of new electricity generation, incentives for rooftop solar, and large supply- and demand-side interventions to bring stability to the grid.
Because of these measures, experts anticipate that load shedding will start to end in late 2025 – although more can be done to bring this date forward, the CEO said.
She listed some of the interventions and what more can be done to speed up and improve their implementation:
- Measure: Municipalities are incentivising customers to invest in embedded generation by paying them for grid feed-in
- Improvement: Cut red tape to allow embedded generators to operate even if not feeding into the grid. Municipalities could be acting faster to accelerate private generation.
- Measure: A standardised wheeling framework is being worked on and is expected soon
- Improvement: Government needs to set clear deadlines, as several private producers are already ready to come online but are being held back by a lack of policy.
- Measure: Boosting and building more grid capacity for new projects, engaging with the private sector through public-private partnerships to enhance grid capacity.
- Improvement: We need to accelerate and plan for it. With a clear plan and timelines, generation can be expanded in areas like the Northern Cape and Eastern Cape, which have the best conditions for renewable energy.
- Measure: Better management of the existing grid
- Improvement: Introduce an electricity production curtailment framework to “shed” generation at times of day when it exceeds grid capacity, so enabling production at other times of the day. New generation can be incentivised in areas where grid capacity is most available.
- Measure: The restructuring of Eskom is ongoing
- Improvement: Progress needs to be accelerated