The Democratic Alliance (DA) has written to Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan and Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe, requesting that they motivate for a Cabinet resolution that addresses impending disaster looming in the country’s electricity sector.
This comes after a number of load-shedding announcements and reports of infrastructure problems at the power utility. On Sunday the power utility announced that the country would be moving to stage 2 load shedding until Wednesday.
It said the loss of four additional generation units at Matla, Tutuka, Duvha and Arnot power stations, exacerbated by the delay in units returning to service at Camden, Matla, Grootvlei and Tutuka power stations, had necessitated the implementation of load shedding.
Eskom said it was forced to implement load shedding to manage and replenish emergency generation reserves, on which it has been relying to supply electricity.
DA spokesperson on Public Enterprises Ghaleb Cachalia said since 17GW of unplanned outages and a further 5GW offline for planned maintenance had been announced – amounting to a third of Eskom’s generation capacity – the country was in a state of disaster, driven by Eskom’s ongoing failures.
He said Eskom had “proved beyond any doubt that it is not able to solve South Africa’s 14 year old load-shedding crisis. The entity’s old generation fleet is on life support and is constantly tripping, resulting in power outages being announced at short and debilitating notice.”
The DA demanded that the Cabinet addressed this immediately and that the situation at Eskom is dealt with urgently by declaring a State of Disaster at Eskom as a prelude to a commission of inquiry into the generation of electricity.
"It is now high time that our demands are addressed. The dire situation in KwaZulu-Natal is being compounded by electricity supply issues which affect the ability to pump much-needed water supplies. People are dying, businesses will die, ports are closed and the country will grind to a halt," Cachalia said.
Eskom warned that there was a possibility the country would have to move to higher stages of load shedding.