{"id":512898,"date":"2021-08-13T12:04:54","date_gmt":"2021-08-13T10:04:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=512898"},"modified":"2021-08-13T12:04:54","modified_gmt":"2021-08-13T10:04:54","slug":"eskom-on-south-africas-new-electricity-regulations-and-load-shedding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/energy\/512898\/eskom-on-south-africas-new-electricity-regulations-and-load-shedding\/","title":{"rendered":"Eskom on South Africa’s new electricity regulations and load shedding"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eskom has welcomed the amendments to section 2 of the Electricity Regulation Act, which it says will assist in creating a stable electricity supply for South Africa.<\/p>\n

Mineral resources and energy minister Gwede Mantashe gazetted the amendments<\/a> <\/strong>on Thursday (12 August), allowing individuals and businesses to install up to 100MW of private power generation without a licence.<\/p>\n

The cumbersome and costly licencing process for self-generation is seen as a major deterrent to bringing much-needed additional generation capacity onto the national grid.<\/p>\n

Firms will also be allowed to sell any excess power generated back into the grid.<\/p>\n

“This is a progressive step that will – over time – greatly assist in the effort to provide reliable and sufficient electricity for the economy while creating space for Eskom to conduct much-needed repairs on its infrastructure,” the power utility said.<\/p>\n

“As Eskom continues implementing the reliability maintenance recovery (RMR) programme to achieve operational sustainability, many electricity units are taken offline for planned maintenance which leaves the national power system constrained.”<\/p>\n

Eskom said that customer-funded capacity, alongside the contribution by independent power producers (IPPs), will greatly assist in addressing the immediate supply\/demand gap and reduce and reduce the risk of load shedding over time.<\/p>\n

“This amendment, together with Eskom’s own efforts to repurpose and repower our ageing power stations, will assist in reducing South Africa’s electricity supply gap.”<\/p>\n

Data published by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) this week shows that the country has spent a significant amount of 2021 in the dark.<\/p>\n

The report shows that South Africa experienced 650 hours of load shedding in the first half of the year \u2013 the equivalent of 27 full days.<\/p>\n

By comparison, 2020 is currently the worst year of load shedding on record, with 859 hours lost over a 12 month period. 2021 has already seen 76% of the load shedding experienced in 2020.<\/p>\n

In the first half of 2021, load shedding occurred each month, dominated by Stage 2, with most of the power cuts happening across March and June.<\/p>\n

\n

Read:\u00a0Government\u2019s plan to fix Eskom and end load shedding in South Africa<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eskom has welcomed the amendments to section 2 of the Electricity Regulation Act, which it says will assist in creating a stable electricity supply for South Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":466991,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9874],"tags":[1164,26],"class_list":["post-512898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy","tag-eskom","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512898"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":512906,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512898\/revisions\/512906"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}