ESKOM WOES, continued: Bring urgently needed skills and new capacity, enable independent power generation – Anton Eberhard

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ESKOM WOES, continued: Bring urgently needed skills and new capacity, enable independent power generation – Anton Eberhard
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ESKOM WOES, continued: Bring urgently needed skills and new capacity, enable independent power generation – Anton Eberhard By Ruan Jooste guritz79

The Eskom Sustainability Task Team, brought together by President Cyril Ramaphosa in late 2018 to advise government on actions to resolve operational, structural and financial challenges at the electricity utility, has revealed some of its findings about the state of the power producer’s dire financial situation, as well as proposals to put it on a more sustainable trajectory.

He highlighted the progress made on the interim report supplied to the presidency in January. Eberhard said the team of six looked into the three main drivers of Eskom’s mandate, including the ability and capacity to secure electricity supply, the financial position to do so and the ways to remain sustainable.

Both the advisory teams to the president and minister said that strong leadership should be reinstated at all key positions, power station manager positions should be made permanent to give authority to make decisions, and all other critical positions need to be filled with great haste. Imperative too, he said, “is to free up the system for generation for less than 100 MW. There is a huge existing pipeline of investment and innovation, so we need it to make it easier for smaller plants to obtain generation licences or to simplify the registration process.”

Eberhard said that Eskom was just not generating enough cash to cover its operations or to service its debt .They are now borrowing additional funds to pay the principal and the interest on its existing debt,” he said. “Debt levels are too high and the way they are dealing with it is unsustainable. Something must give.”

Such initiatives aim at putting global power producers on a more sustainable path, the third and final point Eberhard referred to, and is included in the committee’s terms of reference. He said that South Africa needs to follow the precedent of energy transition elsewhere in the world and perhaps consider other business models for Eskom, which includes restructuring.We need to respond to innovations globally, to ensure Eskom doesn’t continuously return for bailouts, he said.

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