President Jacob Zuma has told Parliament that electricity “demand will exceed supply for the next 24 to 36 months“.

Eskom has implemented load-shedding to ration insufficient supply and this is now likely to continue for the next three years.

Zuma defended his claim that apartheid was the cause of the electricity supply problem‚ saying: “Eskom added 160‚000 households to the grid in the past financial year‚ which added to the demand for electricity“.

He said these were households were “not supplied by apartheid“.

He said that the public enterprise minister‚ Lynne Brown‚ had asked Eskom to accelerate the completion of its build programme.

The construction of the Medupi power station is running several years behind schedule.

Zuma said in Parliament that electricity supply is one of the major constraints to economic growth. But he said plans to increase supply were under way: 100 MW of wind would be secured from a Western Cape wind farm and 827 MW of power would be generated through co-generation contracts.

He said the gas to power plan would equal a “new investment in the economy” as “significant infrastructure will have to be installed“.

Zuma said: “In February we announced an economic growth target of 5% by 2019. We reaffirm this target‚ knowing fully well that it is not going to be easy to achieve it“.

He said “the availability and cost of broadband‚ a regulatory environment that is cumbersome and labour market stability” were other major economic challenges.