South African power cuts should ease over coming days and the nation\u2019s electricity supply will continue to improve over the medium term as new investments bolster generation, according to Public Enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will have load shedding for a while in South Africa,\u201d Gordhan said on Thursday in an interview on Bloomberg TV, using the local term for controlled blackouts. But \u201cnot of the order that we\u2019ve seen in the recent past,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Eskom Holdings, which supplies more than 90% of the nation\u2019s power, cut 6,000 megawatts of power from the national grid over the weekend, leaving businesses and homes without electricity for more than four hours at a stretch.<\/p>\n
Energy shortages date back to 2008 but the problem has become increasingly acute, with outages reaching a record this year as more than half of the utility\u2019s capacity was taken offline at times due to breakdowns and maintenance work.<\/p>\n
South Africa should have built additional capacity almost two decades ago and now needs \u201cmassive investment\u201d in energy infrastructure, according to Gordhan, who oversees Eskom.<\/p>\n
He expects a government initiative to buy more power from private producers of renewable energy to stabilized the energy supply over the longer term, and said there remains a \u201chuge appetite\u201d to invest despite delays to the program.<\/p>\n
Other initiatives have been taken in order to improve Eskom\u2019s performance around, including rehiring experienced staff that worked there and increasing its maintenance budget. The utility had numerous chief executive officers until Andre de Ruyter took over the position in January 2020.<\/p>\n
Eskom\u2019s management has \u201cdone the best they can,\u201d Gordhan said. \u201cI think we\u2019ve got to keep under constant review whether the governance and the management capability is of the order which would help us to meet the current crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eskom implements rolling blackouts when it fails to meet demand in order to keep the grid from a total collapse, which would potentially result in a prolonged outage. Gordhan said there was \u201cno risk whatsoever\u201d of that happening.<\/p>\n