Ramokgopa promises to end power cuts and meet electricity demand

The minister of electricity Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa says apart from ending  power outages, his department is focused on creating more capacity for next winter. 

Speaking during a briefing held at the GCIS Auditorium in Pretoria, Ramokgopa told the media about the progress made regarding security issues related to the implementation of the energy action plan. 

“When there is the meeting point of plummeting generation capacity and elevated demand then we are in significant trouble. The point I’ve been making consistently is that when we have resolved the loadshedding problem, our measure to the degree in which we are able to say to the public that loadshedding has been resolved has little to do with summer conditions, but it has everything to do with our ability to meet demand that is 34,000 megawatts which is essentially the peak that we had projected for winter,” he said. 

“So, our task is two-fold; the first one is that in the shortest possible space of time we end loadshedding and then make it possible that we are creating additional capacity and a buffer as we enter the next winter season.”

Ramokgopa said that the inability to meet demand is the reason why stage 6 blackouts made a return last week. 

“Demand went up and generation plummeted and that’s what necessitated and led to stage 6 loadshedding. And of course, it doesn’t help that we had not replenished our resources which are water for our pump storage and issues around open cycle gas turbines,” he said. 

Ramokgopa said that there are units that would be returning to service to provide an additional 1,305 megawatts. He also touched on the criminal, security and safety issues that Eskom experiences. 

“Over the period between April 2022 to date, there are 2,147 Eskom cases that have been reported to the police About 1,586 of these are under investigation and since that period, 126 arrests have been made so you can see that it’s gradual, yet meaningful progress that has been made,” he said. 

“In an attempt to fix the electricity issue, we are also focusing on fixing the underlying issues which have been fraud and corruption and issues of security and safety at Eskom,” he said. 

Ramokgopa concluded by promising that an additional 5,000 megawatts would be returned to the grid by July 18. 

“I’m very confident that the team will keep to that so that we don’t go into outage sleeps and we are able to attend to the demand as expected.”